[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Imanuel Costigan]

I’d suggest going with CommonMark if this will be the basis of broader support for Markdown as it is well defined whereas GruberMarkdown is defined by broad conventions with specifics determined by parsers. 

> On 24 May 2015, at 12:01 pm, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 23/05/2015 8:51 PM, Baptiste Auguie wrote:
>> John MacFarlane, the author of Pandoc, has been working on a project
>> (http://commonmark.org/) to define a standard reference for Markdown*.
>> There are already two reference implementations, one in javascript, the
>> other in C:  https://github.com/jgm/cmark
> 
> It sounds as though there are at least two possibilities for parsers
> that could be included in R:  Sundown and commonmark.  The "markdown"
> package does some of what R would need to make use of Sundown, but not
> all:  we really do need an R object representation of the parse tree,
> for functions like news() to work with in the short term, and the help
> system in the longer term.  To allow NEWS.md to be used, we'd also need
> someone to work out the conventions for what's allowed (probably very
> similar to the conventions for NEWS or NEWS.Rd), and write code to work
> with those files.
> 
> Does anyone want to work on this?
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
>