[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Gavin Simpson]

Mark,

As NEWS is not (yet) a required file for an R package on CRAN, we might do
well to encourage developers to provide that information. If moving with
the times means that more R package authors do that then I'll all for
allowing markdown. Many package authors do include markdown material
because github renders this nicely and those package authors are using
github because that suits them. If R can accommodate those developers and
at the same time encourage others to add this information, that's better
than having those developers deciding it's not worth their time to write a
NEWS file when they already include this information in github-specific
forms (release notes/messages), Issues, etc.

roxygen2 doesn't generate Rd markup, it just inserts the values of roxygen
tags into a pre-exising template (it may actually inject some Rd
boilerplate). You still need to write Rd markup in the values however.

Cheers

G

On 5 June 2015 at 00:53, Mark van der Loo <mark.vanderloo at gmail.com> wrote:

> @Gavin: My aim was to point out that the ability to mix developer-facing
> documentation with user-facing documentation is not a good reason to want
> to support md.
>
> I agree with Duncan that links to within a package would be useful (not
> sure if NEWS.Rd supports this).
>
> I'm not so convinced that package authors that do not even add a plain
> text NEWS file will create a NEWS.md file.
>
> Adding NEWS.md means we now have three ways to specify the NEWS:
>
> - a plain text NEWS file; following the GNU recommendations
> - NEWS.Rd
> - NEWS.md
>
> Would it not be more elegant to have e.g. roxygen2 generate NEWS.Rd?
> (perhaps it is already possible, I'm not sure of that). I don't maintain
> CRAN, but I know what I would prefer..
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
>
>
> ​
>
>
>


-- 
Gavin Simpson, PhD

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