[Rd] NEWS file (was faqs)

[friedrich.leisch at stat.uni-muenchen.de]

>>>>> On Fri, 16 Nov 2007 10:20:36 +0000 (GMT),
>>>>> Prof Brian Ripley (PBR) wrote:

  > 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).

As most having both are by me I also checked the rest: In all cases
on CRAN they are identical copies. I have a soft link in all my
packages from inst/NEWS to top level (such that it gets installed, but
it is also easily found in the sources).

If we install the top-level NEWS file I would remove the link (but as
Brian said, we've been there before).

Best,
Fritz