[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

This is supported by the NEWS.Rd mechanism, but many authors don't use it.
I agree; it would be wonderful if everyone used it and I think the main
(potential) advantage of this thread is to make it used (both by developers
and users) more broadly.

Kasper

On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Michael Dewey <lists at dewey.myzen.co.uk>
wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>
> --
> Michael
> http://www.dewey.myzen.co.uk/home.html
>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

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