[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

Fri Jun 5 18:32:49 CEST 2015

On 05/06/2015 8:16 AM, Thomas J. Leeper wrote:
> It's disappointing that many packages do not have a NEWS file. Perhaps
> CRAN should require NEWS or CHANGELOG, as long as the system is being
> reformed to potentially accommodate markdown anyway.

I think we should all be careful about suggesting work for other 
people.  This would be a huge amount of work, probably hundreds of hours 
in aggregate, for all those package authors and the CRAN maintainers.

On the other hand, we can gently nudge package authors to better 
practices.  When we talk in public about R packages, we should point out 
that we use a certain list of characteristics to judge their quality.  
My list includes:

  - Is it on CRAN?
  - Does it have an overview vignette?
  - Is it updated fairly regularly?
  - Do most of the help pages include examples?
  - Will it install on my OS without much trouble?

Your list could include

  - Does it have a readable NEWS file?

I do use packages which have negative answers to some of those 
questions, but they definitely influence my choice when I'm looking at a 
package for the first time.

Duncan Murdoch

>
> -Thomas
>
> Thomas J. Leeper
> http://www.thomasleeper.com
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 12:00 PM,  <r-devel-request at r-project.org> wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2015 12:39:34 -0400
> > From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
> > To: Mark van der Loo <mark.vanderloo at gmail.com>, Kurt.Hornik at wu.ac.at
> > Cc: R Devel Mailing List <r-devel at r-project.org>,       Dirk Eddelbuettel
> >         <edd at debian.org>, Imanuel Costigan <i.costigan at me.com>
> > Subject: Re: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN
> > Message-ID: <55707F46.5010108 at gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
> >
> > On 04/06/2015 11:05 AM, Mark van der Loo wrote:
> >> FWIW (and a bit late in the discussion, I know), I for one do not care
> >> about having NEWS in md format at all.
> >>
> >> The solution the Yihui uses (linking to GH from NEWS.Rd) is really annoying
> >> for people with no direct Internet access. For example, I work at an
> >> institute that handles a lot of private data and most VM's with R on it
> >> have no direct internet access for that reason (of course internet is
> >> accessible but through an application running on a separate VM).
> >>
> >> Moreover, I as a user also do not care at all about links to GH #issues and
> >> which @user did what for each issue. These are details that are useful for
> >> people developing the package or for people who reported a bug. As a user I
> >> just want to read a short description like "bugfix: function f crashed on
> >> input y", or "function g is deprecated" without having to first navigate to
> >> another website.
> >>
> >> The most important thing about the NEWS is that it is easy to find (so in a
> >> fixed place), and aimed at users, not developers. It should come with the
> >> software, so it is also available when GH is offline or replaced with
> >> something new (since hey, didn't we all have a sourceforge or google code
> >> account in our younger days?).
> >>
> >> In short, I think that added value of NEWS.md is fairly limited but it does
> >> increase the risk of dispersing the NEWS all over the web.
> >
> > I'd disagree a little bit:  NEWS should be both for users and
> > developers.  The advantage I see to NEWS.md support is that it will
> > encourage people who are more comfortable writing in Markdown to include
> > the news in the package, rather than having a link to external news (as
> > Yihui did), or no news at all (as many packages do).
> >
> > It's pretty easy to have plain text news, but links in the news are
> > helpful.  Links to bug reports are of most use to developers, but other
> > links are useful to users.  For example, though I don't think anyone is
> > making use of this, it should be possible to have links from NEWS.Rd (or
> > NEWS.md when it is fully supported) directly into R's help system.  That
> > would be especially useful for users.  It would probably even work on
> > isolated systems, as long as they don't block access to the local http
> > server.
> >
> > Duncan Murdoch
> >>
> >> Best,
> >> Mark
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Op wo 3 jun. 2015 om 08:32 schreef Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu.ac.at>:
> >>
> >> > >>>>> Duncan Murdoch writes:
> >> >
> >> > > 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.
> >> >
> >> > Sure.  We currently have
> >> >
> >> > pandoc 1.12.4.2
> >> > Compiled with texmath 0.6.6.1, highlighting-kate 0.5.8.5.
> >> >
> >> > which we use with --email-obfuscation=references.
> >> >
> >> > Best
> >> > -k
> >> >
> >> > > 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
> >> >
> >> > ______________________________________________
> >> > 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