[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 02/06/2015 11:42 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> On 2 June 2015 at 11:25, 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.
>
> Thumbs up -- the 'rmarkdown' package by JJ et al basically already does just
> this, and I have now authored a few (beamer) presentations that way.  And
> quite like it.  It is all fully scriptable -- and of course available
> interactive in whatever R shell you prefer -- and only requires pandoc
> besides what is on CRAN.   Maybe medium-term Jeroen's commonmark can replace
> pandoc and then we'd fully based on CRAN packages.

Several of us have been talking about this, and have more or less 
decided against pandoc for the within-R version.  It is too hard to 
build, or to include with R, on weird platforms.   Something like 
commonmark is more likely.  We'd also like to separate the parse and 
render steps.

Duncan Murdoch