[Rd] Issue tracking in packages [was: Re: [R] change in, read.spss, package foreign?]

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 9/10/05, Frank E Harrell Jr <f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> I would vote for allowing a URL or external file name in in DESCRIPTION,
> whose contents could be automatically displayed for the user when
> needed.  Our changelogs are automatically generated by CVS and are on
> the web.

Normally I would have expected a NEWS file to contain information
similar to the R NEWS file 

   https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/NEWS

which is a less granular summary of the cvs or svn logs.  

   http://developer.r-project.org/R.svnlog.2005

For those of my packages that use svn I also have a NEWS
file.  The NEWS and log files are not the same.

If the DESCRIPTION file were to pull in log files off the net or
otherwise then I think it should be done at build time and incorporated 
into the distribution.

Perhaps we need the capability to reference both the NEWS file 
and the cvs/svn logs.