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

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> 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.

I would not vote for pulling files off the net.  It is useful to see 
change log entries dated after when the package was built, so the users 
can get a sense of the value of updating or can bother the maintainer to 
create a new version.

Frank

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


-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University