[Rd] Wishlist: Vignettes on CRAN

[Gabor Grothendieck]

I currently put my NEWS file in ./inst as the build procedure will
automatically copy that to the main directory of the built distribution.
Thus it appears in
the installed distribution so at least one can get it without
also downloading and unpacking the source.  I also put a note in
mypkg-package.Rd that one can access it via:

   file.show(system.file("NEWS", package = "mypkg"))

where mypkg is the name of the package in this example.  Ditto
for THANKS, README and WISHLIST.   As an example:

library(dyn)
package?dyn

If the build procedure would not delete NEWS files from the
main directory of a package then they could be put there.
One idea might be to not delete any file that is all in caps.

On 5/22/06, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>
> On 22 May 2006 at 23:24, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> | This would certainly be nice.
> |
> | Note that the BioConductor package vignettes are online:
> |    http://www.bioconductor.org/docs/vignettes.html
> | but there is nothing comparable for CRAN.
> |
> | In some cases the package has a home page mentioned in the
> | URL field of the DESCRIPTION file and following that can sometimes
> | get vignette or other information although I agree we really need
> | a standardized way to discover that a vignette exists and to access
> | it without installing the package.
> |
> | It would also be nice to be able to access the ChangeLog or NEWS
> | file online as well as from the installed package.  Currently one has
> | to download and unpack the source to get it in many cases and even
> | then one can't even be sure that it exists.  That's even worse than
> | the sitution with vignettes.
>
> If we agreed on a (voluntary, of course) format and location for NEWS and/or
> ChangeLog, then it would be easy to parse these from freshly uploaded files
> and do value-added tricks like RSS feeds of changes, new uploads, ...
>
> Dirk
>
> --
> Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
>                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison
>