R devel - Sep 2005 - Issue tracking in packages [was: Re: [R] change in, read.spss, package foreign?]

I would vote for allowing a URL or external file name in in DESCRIPTION, 
whose contents could be automatically displayed for the user when 
needed.  Our changelogs are automatically generated by CVS and are on 
the web.
-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University

Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> I would vote for allowing a URL or external file name in in DESCRIPTION, 
> whose contents could be automatically displayed for the user when 
> needed.  Our changelogs are automatically generated by CVS and are on 
> the web.
 From a repositoriy maintainer's point of view:
Yes, if people really want it, then please something in a DESCRIPTION 
file. Lookup whether a file exists takes a lot of time, in particular if 
you do not have the source package in an extracted form.

Note that CRAN does not have to handle one or two packages, but 
processes 600 for each repository...

Uwe Ligges

On 9/10/05, Frank E Harrell Jr <f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu>
wrote:
> I would vote for allowing a URL or external file name in in DESCRIPTION,
> whose contents could be automatically displayed for the user when
> needed.  Our changelogs are automatically generated by CVS and are on
> the web.
Normally I would have expected a NEWS file to contain information
similar to the R NEWS file 

   https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/NEWS

which is a less granular summary of the cvs or svn logs.  

   http://developer.r-project.org/R.svnlog.2005

For those of my packages that use svn I also have a NEWS
file.  The NEWS and log files are not the same.

If the DESCRIPTION file were to pull in log files off the net or
otherwise then I think it should be done at build time and incorporated 
into the distribution.

Perhaps we need the capability to reference both the NEWS file 
and the cvs/svn logs.

On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> I would vote for allowing a URL or external file name in in DESCRIPTION,
> whose contents could be automatically displayed for the user when
> needed.  Our changelogs are automatically generated by CVS and are on
> the web.
Yes, this would be nice.

However, a URL facility is already present (and you already use it, and 
link changelogs to the URL, as do I).

 	-thomas

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On 9/10/05, Frank E Harrell Jr <f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> 
>>I would vote for allowing a URL or external file name in in DESCRIPTION,
>>whose contents could be automatically displayed for the user when
>>needed.  Our changelogs are automatically generated by CVS and are on
>>the web.
> 
> 
> Normally I would have expected a NEWS file to contain information
> similar to the R NEWS file 
> 
>    https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/NEWS
> 
> which is a less granular summary of the cvs or svn logs.  
> 
>    http://developer.r-project.org/R.svnlog.2005
> 
> For those of my packages that use svn I also have a NEWS
> file.  The NEWS and log files are not the same.
> 
> If the DESCRIPTION file were to pull in log files off the net or
> otherwise then I think it should be done at build time and incorporated 
> into the distribution.
I would not vote for pulling files off the net.  It is useful to see 
change log entries dated after when the package was built, so the users 
can get a sense of the value of updating or can bother the maintainer to 
create a new version.

Frank
> 
> Perhaps we need the capability to reference both the NEWS file 
> and the cvs/svn logs.
> 

-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University