[R] where are the NEWS for R <3.0.0?

[Ben Marwick]

I'm looking for the NEWS files for versions of R before 3.0.0, does 
anyone know where they are? I'm interested in getting the names of 
people who have been acknowledged when changes are made to R.

At the bottom of http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/NEWS.html it says

"Older news can be found in text format in files NEWS.0, NEWS.1 and 
NEWS.2 in the ‘doc’ directory. News in HTML format for R versions from 
2.10.0 to 2.15.3 is in NEWS.2.html."

The text includes these URLs:

http://cran.r-project.org/src/NEWS.0
http://cran.r-project.org/src/NEWS.1
http://cran.r-project.org/src/NEWS.2
http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/NEWS.2.html

All of these go to 404s, and when src is replaced by doc, as suggested 
by the text, they also go to 404s. There are no NEWS files in here 
either: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/html/ So there are a bunch of 
broken links here.

I found a bunch of PDFs listed here http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/ 
dating from 2008-2001. Are these only source of the earlier NEWS files?

They're less convenient because the NEWS section is not a single plain 
text file, but a section of the PDF document. I'd be most grateful to 
know where I can find html or txt files of the earlier NEWS files. If 
the PDFs are all there are, it would be good to know that for sure.

The other method I was considering was scraping bugzilla for names of 
people who submitted bugs that resulted in a fix 
(https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/buglist.cgi?product=R&query_format=advanced&resolution=FIXED). 
But text mining the NEWS files would be quicker for a first approximation.

thanks,

Ben

-- 
Ben Marwick, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Denny Hall M32, Box 353100, University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3100 USA

t. (+1) 206.552.9450   e. bmarwick at uw.edu
f. (+1) 206.543.3285   w. http://faculty.washington.edu/bmarwick/