[Rd] NEWS file (was faqs)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Simon Urbanek wrote:

>
> On Nov 15, 2007, at 10:53 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>
>> On 11/15/2007 9:57 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>>> On Nov 14, 2007, at 11:55 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>>> inst/NEWS would have the advantage of consistency with R itself
>>>> which also has a NEWS file.
>>>>
>>> I vote for NEWS for reasons above plus because that's what I use in
>>> my  packages already ;).
>>> IMHO it should be installed automatically if present, i.e. it
>>> shouldn't be necessary to have it in inst/NEWS, just plain NEWS
>>> should  suffice.
>>
>> And you're volunteering to make that change?
>>
>
> Yup, in R-devel now (43464). However, there are other candidate files
> as well and we don't do anything with the NEWS file just yet ... any
> further ideas?

We've recommended inst/NEWS for some time (some people are late to this 
party), and tens of packages have it. However, a further tens of packages 
have a top-level NEWS, and I would assume that (at least some of) the 
authors were deliberately not installing it and so will now need to rename 
it.

I think the writeup needs to make clear what happens if you have both NEWS 
and inst/NEWS (some packages do).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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