[Rd] Minimum requirements for package submission

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 28 August 2013 at 09:01, Kevin Wright wrote:
|  Before knitr became an accepted engine for vignettes, I had a
| knitr-generated vignette that I included in a package.  It could just as
| easily have been a Word file saved as a pdf.  There was some trick to doing
| this (which I have forgotten).  Something like creating an extremely
| minimal .rnw file and then including the vignette with the same name and a
| .pdf extension.  Search the R-help mail archives and you can find other
| people who have included non-.rnw vignettes.

Sort of. Kinda. Maybe not quite. I think you may be assuming "constant
requirements" at the CRAN side.  They are anything but -- and to be plain,
that is a Good Thing (TM) in the long run.

The change to preferring vignettes/ over inst/doc/ is just one of many; there
is also an ongoing preference for vignettes that fully reproducible from
source. Which may eventually put an end to non-Rnw / non-(la)tex vignettes.

Related rant: I really wish we had "CHANGES" file, or a section in the
manuals. It is virtually impossible to look at a current "Writing R
Extensions" manual, and a previous one, in order to get a succinct view of
what changed.  Having to diff the NEWS files, or glancing at commit logs via
the RCS is a very poor proxy.

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com