R devel - Nov 2009 - Suggestion: Add links to NEWS and CHANGES on help.start() page

Hi,

right now it is actually a bit tricky to locate and view the NEWS and
the CHANGES files, especially if you are a beginning and don't even
know that you are supposed to look for them.

I'd like to recommend that links to (local) NEWS and CHANGES are added
to the help.start() overview pages.  help("NEWS")/help("CHANGE
LOG")
and help("CHANGES") could display/refer to them as well.

/Henrik

On Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:37:31 +0100 Henrik Bengtsson 
<hb at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I'd like to recommend that links to (local) NEWS and CHANGES are added
> to the help.start() overview pages. 
help("NEWS")/help("CHANGE LOG")
> and help("CHANGES") could display/refer to them as well.
Are you talking of the NEWS and CHANGES for R itself, or for packages 
too? It would be very useful having a convenience function for this for 
packages too. Perhaps something like

library(news=MASS) (or MASS as a character string)
and
library(changes=spdep)

similar to library(help=MASS)

Or have I overlooked something, and a function for this already exists?

-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer

Its also difficult to know about demos unless you specifically issue a
demo(package = "mypackage") command.  It would be nice if these were
listed too.

Note that the NEWS and/or ChangeLog file are listed on the package's
CRAN page such as:

   http://cran.r-project.org/package=zoo

but the demos are not listed even there.

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 3:37 AM, Henrik Bengtsson <hb at
stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> right now it is actually a bit tricky to locate and view the NEWS and
> the CHANGES files, especially if you are a beginning and don't even
> know that you are supposed to look for them.
>
> I'd like to recommend that links to (local) NEWS and CHANGES are added
> to the help.start() overview pages.
?help("NEWS")/help("CHANGE LOG")
> and help("CHANGES") could display/refer to them as well.
>
> /Henrik
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

On 13/11/2009 3:37 AM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> right now it is actually a bit tricky to locate and view the NEWS and
> the CHANGES files, especially if you are a beginning and don't even
> know that you are supposed to look for them.
> 
> I'd like to recommend that links to (local) NEWS and CHANGES are added
> to the help.start() overview pages. 
help("NEWS")/help("CHANGE LOG")
> and help("CHANGES") could display/refer to them as well.
> 
I've done this now in R-devel.

(I thought I'd written about this yesterday, but I don't see my post, so
maybe it never made it out.  If it did, the text below may be a repeat.)

It would look better if the files were translated into HTML.  Anyone 
want to write a news2HTML function?

I haven't done any of the package-specific suggestions yet; they're 
slightly trickier because packages are inconsistent in how they present 
news.  For those, I think we should use the news() function, but it 
requires the news2HTML translation to give nice looking output.

Duncan Murdoch