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.
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. 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
What about treating it as a plain text file (i.e. no need for CRAN to support parsing)?> On 23 May 2015, at 11:08 am, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote: > > 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. > > 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 >
What I do is to use inst/NEWS.Rd as a placeholder that points to the NEWS.md on Github, e.g. http://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/knitr/index.html Regards, Yihui -- Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com> Web: http://yihui.name On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 8:08 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:> 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. > > 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
>>>>> 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
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.In answer to your original question: plans are now being formed. It seems as though full support should be feasible, but someone needs to volunteer to do it and maintain it. By full support, I mean support that's equal to the support for NEWS.Rd on CRAN and in R. It's possible we'll get weaker support sooner, e.g. display of the Markdown source in R and pandoc output on CRAN; that remains to be determined. No predicted time line for any of this. Duncan Murdoch