[Rd] Wishlist: Vignettes on CRAN

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> Dirk Eddelbuettel writes:

> 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, ...

I still don't think there can be one format to agree upon.  Imho it
would be better to have package (DESCRIPTION) metadata pointing to the
changelog/news db and maybe also providing an indication of its format.

-k