[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Kevin Ushey]

I like the idea of supporting a small, strict subset of Markdown that
can be used to translate from NEWS.md to NEWS.

Following from Yihui's example, it would be pretty easy to write a
parser in R for such a format (and I'd be willing to try implementing
one, if that would be of interest).

Kevin

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 10:20 AM, Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> wrote:
> That is more or less what I had been doing for a long time (having
> both NEWS.md and NEWS), but decided not to do it any more last year.
> In fact, you can easily convert NEWS.md to a NEWS file that R's news()
> can understand, e.g.
> https://github.com/yihui/knitr/blob/947ad5fc94/Makefile#L8-L10 (if
> your NEWS.md is like this
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yihui/knitr/947ad5fc94/NEWS.md)
>
> I stopped doing this because as I said, I found Github release notes
> much more pleasant to read (https://github.com/yihui/knitr/releases),
> and I do not care much about the possibility that some users do not
> have internet connections when reading the NEWS (it is a legitimate
> concern, though). IMHO, it is totally worth it if we are talking about
> official support of Markdown in R's documentation system (.Rd files),
> and it is probably not worth the time and effort if we only want to
> support NEWS.md in particular. That is just a tiny problem compared to
> the effort of porting CommonMark or whatever Markdown rendering
> engines into R.
>
> Regards,
> Yihui
>
>
> On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Duncan Murdoch
> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I imagine GitHub users could have both NEWS.md and NEWS, with one being
>> a symlink to the other, and .Rbuildignore set to ignore NEWS.md.  Why
>> not try it, and post instructions for other Github users?  news() won't
>> be able to understand the headings, but it should display the file as a
>> bunch of text.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>
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