[Rd] Possible bug in 2.11.x texmf makefile.in and some related things...

[Marc Schwartz]

On Jul 5, 2010, at 2:52 AM, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> ....
>>> So there was perhaps an oversight of sorts for 2.11.x in handling 
>>> these two JSS related files.
>> 
>> That's a different hand.  I don't know if the files were intended to 
>> be installed in 2.11.x: they are in R-devel so eventually packages 
>> depending on R >= 2.12.0 will be able to rely on them.
>> 
> 
> 
> Looking through the logs, those two files were indeed committed to
> r-devel, but long before the creation of R-2-11-branch. They appear not
> to be used in any other part of the sources, so are indeed pretty
> useless if not copied to the tarball


So R has an appendix...  ;-)

Actually, they are in the 2.11.x tarballs. They are just not installed to the target directory tree after a build, given the code in the Makefile.in.


> (since we should not assume that
> people in general build from svn checkouts).


I do and have been for quite some time, but maybe I am just weird that way... 

:-)

Perhaps starting with 2.12.x, I will modify my build script to download the tarball instead.


> But as Brian points out,
> they are only two out of many files that could be included as a service
> to the user.
> 
>>> 3. A final note, which is that the NEWS file appears to be missing 
>>> from R-Devel tonight:
> ...
> 
>>       \item \file{NEWS} is no longer in the sources, but generated as
>>       part of the installation.  The primary source for changes is now
>>       \file{doc/NEWS.Rd}.
>> 
>> A version of the NEWS file will be in the tarballs.
> 
> Yes. It's generally a bad principle to have anything but the base
> sources in the repository, although we have had so for some things in
> the past (notably Java class files), because we couldn't rely on
> everyone having the appropriate tools. Especially with text files there
> will always be the risk of editing the target file instead of the
> source. (Just ask the editor of The R Journal how easy it is to remember
> to edit RJournal.dtx and not RJournal.sty...)


Yep.

Thanks Peter.

Regards,

Marc