From xie at yihui.name  Sun May 24 19:20:59 2015
From: xie at yihui.name (Yihui Xie)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2015 12:20:59 -0500
Subject: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN
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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



[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN
Yihui Xie