[R-pkg-devel] No news entries found

[Plamen Mirazchiyski]

Thank you all for your help.

I have found the problem - I had accented characters in names of people 
I was thanking for discovering bugs. After replacing them with 
non-accented characters everything went just fine and the package is on 
its way to CRAN.

I do find, though, the message "No news entries found." quite 
misleading. Yes, there is a problem, but the message is not even close 
to what actual the problem is. Unfortunately, the r-svn repository on 
GitHub does not have the possibility to report this as an issue.

Thank you once again.

Best,
Plamen

On 7/8/2022 12:21 AM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> )There's been recent updates in R-devel
> (https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/baf375d8b65414daebf85e226a1e5103a93ab138
> that do more validation of the syntax/format in NEWS and NEWS.md
> files. This was done to make sure news() works in more cases (e.g. it
> may return just NULL if the NEWS.md file is not formatted as the tool
> expect).  I guess it will also help render NEWS/NEWS.md files on the
> CRAN package pages.
>
> If you run,
>
> news(package = "RALSA")
>
> and see the NEWS entries, then the format should be correct, otherwise
> not.  You can use:
>
> news <- tools:::.build_news_db_from_package_NEWS_md("NEWS.md")
> if (is.null(news)) stop("Syntax error in NEWS.md")
>
> to troubleshoot.  If you get an error, i.e. 'news' is NULL, then you
> need to fix up your NEWS.md file.  I don't think the format is
> documented yet, so you might have to do some trial error to figure it
> out.  Although it's not an official format, if you follow
> https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/reference/build_news.html, it typically
> works.  When I did it some weeks ago, I started with a minimal
> NEWS.md, e.g. the top version, and then I added the other entries back
> to find which ones were problematic.  See
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HenrikBengtsson/progressr/0.10.1/NEWS.md
> for an example that works on CRAN
> (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/progressr/news/news.html) and
> with news(package = "progressr").
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Henrik
>
> On Thu, Jul 7, 2022 at 11:37 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 07/07/2022 3:55 p.m., Plamen Mirazchiyski wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Today I have submitted a new version of the RALSA package. Soon after I
>>> received an automatic email letting me know that the package did not
>>> pass some of the pre-tests:
>> It would be helpful to let us know where to see the troublesome NEWS.md
>> file.  Maybe a small change in formatting is causing these false positives.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>>
>>>> package RALSA_1.3.0.tar.gz does not pass the incoming checks automatically, please see the following pre-tests:
>>>> Windows:<https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/RALSA_1.3.0_20220707_190307/Windows/00check.log>
>>>> Status: 2 NOTEs
>>>> Debian:<https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/RALSA_1.3.0_20220707_190307/Debian/00check.log>
>>>> Status: 1 NOTE
>>>>
>>>> Last released version's CRAN status: OK: 9, NOTE: 4
>>>> See:<https://CRAN.R-project.org/web/checks/check_results_RALSA.html>
>>> To summarize:
>>>
>>> 1. Windows checks found possibly invalid DOIs. This is to be ignored, as
>>> stated here:
>>> https://www.mail-archive.com/r-package-devel@r-project.org/msg07116.html
>>>
>>> 2. Windows, Debian (gcc) and Fedora (clang and gcc) drop the following note:
>>>
>>> checking package subdirectories ... NOTE
>>> Problems with news in 'NEWS.md':
>>> No news entries found.
>>>
>>> This is rather strange because I have added one of the largest news
>>> updates I ever made for this package in the NEWS.md file with this
>>> submission. Further, this note appears only in these four of the 13
>>> platforms where the package is checked.
>>>
>>> Apparently, this is beyond my control and I can do nothing to fix it on
>>> my end. I have already replied to the email to notify the
>>> CRAN-submissions using R-project.org this is a false-positive as advised in
>>> the email itself, but I thought the mailing list should also be aware of
>>> this issue.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Plamen
>>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-package-devel using r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel

-- 
======================
Plamen Mirazchiyski, PhD
International Educational Research and Evaluation Institute
24 Tehnološki park
SI-1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia
tel.: +386 51 303 817
email: plamen.mirazchiyski using ineri.org