From gmbecker at ucdavis.edu  Thu Jun  4 17:32:02 2015
From: gmbecker at ucdavis.edu (Gabriel Becker)
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2015 08:32:02 -0700
Subject: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN
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Message-ID: <CADwqtCOF92XcibBt+UMWzPxAcR_x-ixt-X5x0-AAfctAs-75WA@mail.gmail.com>

Mark,

With respect I think you're conflating two different things here.

I completely agree with you that the workflow Yihui uses where the NEWS
file doesn't actually have the NEWS in it in a form that R can understand
is quite bad for users. It also makes the NEWS difficult to compute on,
which has caused me problems.

That is entirely separate from what formats R allows and understands the
NEWS within the package to be declared in, though. I think most people are
talking about supporting the shipping of NEWS in markdown *within the
package*, largely because people just don't like writing Rd files. It's
painful, so many people don't do it. It's easy to say they should do it
anyway, and you wouldn't be wrong, but unfortunately that isn't likely to
sway many people who are busy and have other things they want to do with
their time. Allowing package authors to write a NEWS.md file - and, again,
ship it with the package - eases that pain. With the type of support Duncan
and others are talking about, the end user (you) wouldn't even know if the
package had a NEWS.md or NEWS.Rd file, the result would be the same from
within R.

Best,
~G

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 8:05 AM, Mark van der Loo <mark.vanderloo at gmail.com>
wrote:

> FWIW (and a bit late in the discussion, I know), I for one do not care
> about having NEWS in md format at all.
>
> The solution the Yihui uses (linking to GH from NEWS.Rd) is really annoying
> for people with no direct Internet access. For example, I work at an
> institute that handles a lot of private data and most VM's with R on it
> have no direct internet access for that reason (of course internet is
> accessible but through an application running on a separate VM).
>
> Moreover, I as a user also do not care at all about links to GH #issues and
> which @user did what for each issue. These are details that are useful for
> people developing the package or for people who reported a bug. As a user I
> just want to read a short description like "bugfix: function f crashed on
> input y", or "function g is deprecated" without having to first navigate to
> another website.
>
> The most important thing about the NEWS is that it is easy to find (so in a
> fixed place), and aimed at users, not developers. It should come with the
> software, so it is also available when GH is offline or replaced with
> something new (since hey, didn't we all have a sourceforge or google code
> account in our younger days?).
>
> In short, I think that added value of NEWS.md is fairly limited but it does
> increase the risk of dispersing the NEWS all over the web.
>
> Best,
> Mark
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Op wo 3 jun. 2015 om 08:32 schreef Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu.ac.at>:
>
> > >>>>> Duncan Murdoch writes:
> >
> > > On 02/06/2015 11:05 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> > >> Hi Kurt,
> > >>
> > >> On 1 June 2015 at 14:02, Kurt Hornik wrote:
> > >> | >>>>> peter dalgaard writes:
> > >> |
> > >> | >> On 30 May 2015, at 01:20 , Imanuel Costigan <i.costigan at me.com>
> > wrote:
> > >> | >>
> > >> | >> So I assume this commit means NEWS.md is now no longer on
> > blacklist?
> > >> | >>
> > >> |
> > >> | > ....in the development version. Not true of released versions.
> > >> |
> > >> | Now also in r-patched.
> > >>
> > >> Nice.
> > >>
> > >> Now, is there a way for package authors to preview how a .md would be
> > >> rendered?  I wrote mine with GitHub in mind, and they render fine. I
> > looked a
> > >> recently-uploaded README.md of mine on CRAN, and it got some of the
> > pandoc-y
> > >> parts wrong --- and looks unprofessional.
> > >>
> > >> I would like to avoid that.  How can I?
> >
> > > In the short term, you should probably try to run pandoc with the same
> > > version and options as CRAN.  Kurt, can you say what these are?  If you
> > > (Dirk) know pandoc options that emulate Github, it would probably make
> > > sense for CRAN to use those.
> >
> > Sure.  We currently have
> >
> > pandoc 1.12.4.2
> > Compiled with texmath 0.6.6.1, highlighting-kate 0.5.8.5.
> >
> > which we use with --email-obfuscation=references.
> >
> > Best
> > -k
> >
> > > In the longer term, the plan is to include our own parser and renderer.
> > > At that point this would be easy.
> >
> > > Duncan Murdoch
> > >>
> > >> Dirk
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> | -k
> > >> |
> > >> | > -pd
> > >> |
> > >> |
> > >> | >>
> >
> https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/9ffe87264a1cd59a31a829f72d57af0f1bfa327a
> > >> | >>
> > >> | >> Sent from my iPad
> > >> | >>
> > >> | >> On 23 May 2015, at 6:05 pm, Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu.ac.at>
> > wrote:
> > >> | >>
> > >> | >>>>>>>> Duncan Murdoch writes:
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>>>> On 22/05/2015 8:49 PM, Imanuel Costigan wrote:
> > >> | >>>>> Are there any plans for CRAN to support NEWS files in
> markdown?
> > Bit of a hassle to go the the package?s Github (or other like) site to
> read
> > NEWS.
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>>> Not as far as I know.  There have been discussions about
> > increasing the
> > >> | >>>> support of Markdown, but so far the conclusion has been that
> > it's too
> > >> | >>>> hard to do -- the support is not stable enough on all the
> > platforms
> > >> | >>>> where R runs.
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>> There are actually two issues here.
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>> For CRAN, we could in principle take inst/NEWS.md files, convert
> > these
> > >> | >>> to HTML using pandoc, and use the HTML for the package web page.
> > (Would
> > >> | >>> need the CRAN incoming checks to be taught about inst/NEWS.md.)
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>> However, we cannot use such files for utils::news() because we
> do
> > not
> > >> | >>> (yet?) know how to reliably parse such files and extract the
> news
> > items
> > >> | >>> (and hence cannot really compute on the news information).
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>> Btw, currently only one package on CRAN has inst/NEWS.md
> (another
> > one
> > >> | >>> has NEWS.md at top level).
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>> Best
> > >> | >>> -k
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>>> Markdown is allowed for vignettes (because the package author
> > processes
> > >> | >>>> those), so I'd suggest putting your news into a vignette
> instead
> > of a
> > >> | >>>> news file.  Put in a token news file that points to the
> vignette
> > so
> > >> | >>>> users can find it.
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>>> Duncan Murdoch
> > >> | >>>
> > >> | >>>> ______________________________________________
> > >> | >>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> > >> | >>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> > >> | >>
> > >> | >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> > >> | >>
> > >> | >> ______________________________________________
> > >> | >> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> > >> | >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> > >> |
> > >> | > --
> > >> | > Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
> > >> | > Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
> > >> | > Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
> > >> | > Phone: (+45)38153501
> > >> | > Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
> > >> |
> > >> | > ______________________________________________
> > >> | > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> > >> | > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> > >> |
> > >> | ______________________________________________
> > >> | R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> > >> | https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> > >>
> >
> > > ______________________________________________
> > > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>



-- 
Gabriel Becker, PhD
Computational Biologist
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Genentech, Inc.

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[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN
Gabriel Becker