[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Michael Dewey]

I realise this is not directly related to the topic but if changes are 
afoot would it be possible to make the use of any sort of news or 
changelog more prominent in the documentation? I maintain one of the 
CRAN task views and when someone updates his/her package it is much, 
much easier for me to see what has happened and if I need to update the 
text if they supply a news or changelog.

On 02/06/2015 16:25, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 02/06/2015 11:05 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>> Hi Kurt,
>>
>> On 1 June 2015 at 14:02, Kurt Hornik wrote:
>> | >>>>> peter dalgaard writes:
>> |
>> | >> On 30 May 2015, at 01:20 , Imanuel Costigan <i.costigan at me.com>
>> wrote:
>> | >>
>> | >> So I assume this commit means NEWS.md is now no longer on blacklist?
>> | >>
>> |
>> | > ....in the development version. Not true of released versions.
>> |
>> | Now also in r-patched.
>>
>> Nice.
>>
>> Now, is there a way for package authors to preview how a .md would be
>> rendered?  I wrote mine with GitHub in mind, and they render fine. I
>> looked a
>> recently-uploaded README.md of mine on CRAN, and it got some of the
>> pandoc-y
>> parts wrong --- and looks unprofessional.
>>
>> I would like to avoid that.  How can I?
>
> In the short term, you should probably try to run pandoc with the same
> version and options as CRAN.  Kurt, can you say what these are?  If you
> (Dirk) know pandoc options that emulate Github, it would probably make
> sense for CRAN to use those.
>
> In the longer term, the plan is to include our own parser and renderer.
> At that point this would be easy.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>> Dirk
>>
>> | -k
>> |
>> | > -pd
>> |
>> |
>> | >>
>> https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/9ffe87264a1cd59a31a829f72d57af0f1bfa327a
>>
>> | >>
>> | >> Sent from my iPad
>> | >>
>> | >> On 23 May 2015, at 6:05 pm, Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu.ac.at>
>> wrote:
>> | >>
>> | >>>>>>>> Duncan Murdoch writes:
>> | >>>
>> | >>>>> On 22/05/2015 8:49 PM, Imanuel Costigan wrote:
>> | >>>>> Are there any plans for CRAN to support NEWS files in
>> markdown? Bit of a hassle to go the the package’s Github (or other
>> like) site to read NEWS.
>> | >>>
>> | >>>> Not as far as I know.  There have been discussions about
>> increasing the
>> | >>>> support of Markdown, but so far the conclusion has been that
>> it's too
>> | >>>> hard to do -- the support is not stable enough on all the
>> platforms
>> | >>>> where R runs.
>> | >>>
>> | >>> There are actually two issues here.
>> | >>>
>> | >>> For CRAN, we could in principle take inst/NEWS.md files, convert
>> these
>> | >>> to HTML using pandoc, and use the HTML for the package web
>> page.  (Would
>> | >>> need the CRAN incoming checks to be taught about inst/NEWS.md.)
>> | >>>
>> | >>> However, we cannot use such files for utils::news() because we
>> do not
>> | >>> (yet?) know how to reliably parse such files and extract the
>> news items
>> | >>> (and hence cannot really compute on the news information).
>> | >>>
>> | >>> Btw, currently only one package on CRAN has inst/NEWS.md
>> (another one
>> | >>> has NEWS.md at top level).
>> | >>>
>> | >>> Best
>> | >>> -k
>> | >>>
>> | >>>> Markdown is allowed for vignettes (because the package author
>> processes
>> | >>>> those), so I'd suggest putting your news into a vignette
>> instead of a
>> | >>>> news file.  Put in a token news file that points to the
>> vignette so
>> | >>>> users can find it.
>> | >>>
>> | >>>> Duncan Murdoch
>> | >>>
>> | >>>> ______________________________________________
>> | >>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> | >>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>> | >>
>> | >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>> | >>
>> | >> ______________________________________________
>> | >> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> | >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>> |
>> | > --
>> | > Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
>> | > Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
>> | > Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
>> | > Phone: (+45)38153501
>> | > Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
>> |
>> | > ______________________________________________
>> | > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> | > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>> |
>> | ______________________________________________
>> | R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> | https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>
> ______________________________________________
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> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

-- 
Michael
http://www.dewey.myzen.co.uk/home.html