[R-pkg-devel] cran submission check produces note on news file

[Ivan Krylov]

On Sun, 7 Aug 2022 06:16:30 +0900
Richard Shefferson <cdorm using g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp> wrote:

> I just submitted a version of this package to CRAN, and got a Note on
> the debian check that showed that it could not process the NEWS file.
> All other system pretests (including Windows and MAC) were fine, and
> my own checks on Mac, Ubuntu, and Windows had no such issues. 

I seem to be able to reproduce the errors by setting options(verbose
= TRUE) and then trying to parse the NEWS file with
tools:::.news_reader_default('https://r-forge.r-project.org/scm/viewvc.php/*checkout*/pkg/NEWS?revision=95&root=lefko3').
(It's not a documented entry point, but it's what gets called to read
the news database for your package.)

A plain text NEWS file is supposed to follow a format described in
?news. Your NEWS file looks like Markdown; in fact,
tools:::.build_news_db_from_package_NEWS_md('https://r-forge.r-project.org/scm/viewvc.php/*checkout*/pkg/NEWS?revision=95&root=lefko3')
parses it without producing error messages (so renaming NEWS into
NEWS.md could work around your immediate problems), but the result
doesn't look well: each numbered list is collapsed into a single
paragraph. Try separating the subsections (e.g. "NEW FEATURES" and
"USER-VISIBLE CHANGES") into separate Markdown paragraphs with
double-newlines and following other recommendations for Markdown news
files in ?news.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan