[Rd] Disappearance of the file "NEWS"

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 01/08/2010 2:02 PM, Ben Bolker wrote:
> Laurent <lgautier <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Dear R-developpers,
>>
>> The file NEWS disappeared in r5243, and the authoritative source of 
>> information for what has changed in R is in ./doc/NEWS.Rd.
>>
>> A quick glance at NEWS was extremely helpful for knowing what has 
>> changed, and whether building a (more) recent development version was 
>> needed to test changes, or verify that they would not break existing code.
> 
>  [snip to make Gmane happy]
> 
>   Agreed.  This change also breaks the link on the R developers
> page:
> 
> https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/NEWS
> 
> although one can still, sort of, get to the information via
> 
> http://developer.r-project.org/RSSfeeds.html

I'll fix the link.  In the meantime you can still see the processed news 
online at

http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/NEWS (plain text)

or

http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/doc/html/NEWS.html (HTML)

I think it would not be a good idea to put a stub in place of the NEWS 
file.  Sometimes the stub would be newer than the source NEWS.Rd file 
(depending on how the source had been obtained), and make would skip it: 
  so we'd have to force it to be made every time, necessary or not.

Duncan Murdoch