[Rd] Minimum requirements for package submission

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 28/08/2013 10:26 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 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.

I don't understand the difference between the CHANGES file you are 
asking for and the NEWS file.  Do you want something in purely 
chronological order, rather than categorized as NEWS is?

Duncan Murdoch