[R-pkg-devel] Changes to checks on NEWS?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 26/07/2023 10:18 a.m., J C Nash wrote:
> Thanks for the info, though it seems odd that CRAN wants to
> parse a plain text file that is purely for information, since it
> should have no impact on the current package or any other. I suppose
> there might be character set issues to check. The motive for parsing
> it eludes me.
> 
> Does anyone know if there are plans to use NEWS for some purpose in
> the future i.e., to actually track changes beyond package maintainer's
> comments?

NEWS has been used for a long time by the utils::news() function, which 
in turn is used by the HTML help system.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Cheers, and thanks again.
> 
> JN
> 
> 
> On 2023-07-26 10:03, Ivan Krylov wrote:
>> В Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:37:38 -0400
>> J C Nash <profjcnash using gmail.com> пишет:
>>
>>> I'd like to avoid NOTEs if possible, and since I'm using a plain-text
>>> NEWS, don't believe this should trigger one.
>>
>> Plain-text NEWS files are parsed according to the rules specified in
>> help(news), which is admittedly laconic in its description. If you run
>> tools:::.news_reader_default('https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/optimx/NEWS')
>> (or news(package = 'optimx')), you can see that R's news() already
>> misunderstands some of the contents of your NEWS file.
>>
>> A relatively recent change (r82543, July 2022) set
>> _R_CHECK_NEWS_IN_PLAIN_TEXT_=TRUE for R CMD check --as-cran and started
>> verifying that R's plain text "news reader" function could actually
>> parse plain-text NEWS files without warnings or errors.
>>
>> I think that if you rename NEWS to ChangeLog, R will leave the file
>> alone, but CRAN will offer it to users as plain text.
>>
> 
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