[Rd] Most recent R manuals [Was: Likely disruption to R-devel builds on Windows]

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 30/04/2010 10:48 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> > On 30/04/2010 10:22 AM, hadley wickham wrote:
> >>
> >> Maybe Duncan could apply the same script that's being used for RNEWS
> >> to the manuals?  An RSS feed of changes to the manuals would be really
> >> useful.
> >>
> >
> > My script is very NEWS specific.  The manuals would be harder.  You could
> > get the diffs from svn pretty easily, but displaying them would be trickier:
> >  do you display the diffs in the .texi source, or convert to HTML and
> > display the diffs there, or what?  How much context around them?  Not
> > impossible, but not trivial.
> >
>
> Just making the source diffs easily accessible would be sufficient IMHO.

That's already available, but not too pretty.  E.g.

svn log -v https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/doc/manual | less

will show something like

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r51865 | ripley | 2010-04-30 00:56:00 -0400 (Fri, 30 Apr 2010) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/doc/manual/R-admin.texi
   M /trunk/src/gnuwin32/CHANGES
   M /trunk/src/library/tools/R/install.R

tests starssrc/library/tools/R/install.R
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r51858 | ripley | 2010-04-29 00:51:01 -0400 (Thu, 29 Apr 2010) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/doc/manual/R-exts.texi

tweak wording
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r51854 | ripley | 2010-04-28 10:41:26 -0400 (Wed, 28 Apr 2010) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/doc/manual/R-exts.texi

more on portability
 (etc.)

and for particular details, you can do something like

svn diff -c 51858 https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/doc/manual

which will give

Index: R-exts.texi
===================================================================
--- R-exts.texi (revision 51857)
+++ R-exts.texi (revision 51858)
@@ -10813,10 +10813,10 @@

 The @R{} for Windows installers have for a long time allowed the value
 of @code{R_HOME} to be recorded in the Windows Registry: this is
-optional but the default. Where is it is recorded has changed over the
-years to allow for multiple versions of @R{} to be installed at once,
-and as from @R{} 2.11.0, to allow 32- and 64-bit versions of @R{} to be
-installed on the same machine.
+optional but selected by default.  @emph{Where} is it is recorded has
+changed over the years to allow for multiple versions of @R{} to be
+installed at once, and as from @R{} 2.11.0, to allow 32- and 64-bit
+versions of @R{} to be installed on the same machine.

 The basic Registry location is @code{Software\R-core\R}.  For an
 administrative install this is under @code{HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE} and on a

The non-trivial part is converting it into a nice display like what you 
pointed out in the Wiki.

Duncan Murdoch