[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 23 May 2015 at 08:14, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| I think the harder problem is display.  CRAN can run pandoc, but can
| users who install the package from source?  I would expect some obscure
| platforms (like Windows ;-) would not have it available.  I could add it
| to Rtools on Windows, but I think platforms that normally install tools
| from source will have more trouble, because it has an unusual
| prerequisite (Haskell).  We could fall back to displaying the NEWS.md
| file without processing, but that makes lots of code more complicated.

If you had spare time, you could coordinate with JJ.  He somehow managed to
get pandoc to build as a standalone binary without any runtime requirements
so that it could be included with RStudio.  And so it has been for quite some
time.  Every machine with an RStudio installation has pandoc.

Maybe we could consider carrying this over from RStudio into Rtools?
Similarly, on OS X and Linux maybe we could add a layer that would R allow to
query an RStudio instance, if present, to tell it where its pandoc is, if no
suitable pandoc binary is in the path.  Just thinking out loud...

Dirk

-- 
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