R devel - Aug 2010 - Disappearance of the file "NEWS"

Dear R-developpers,

The file NEWS disappeared in r5243, and the authoritative source of 
information for what has changed in R is in ./doc/NEWS.Rd.

A quick glance at NEWS was extremely helpful for knowing what has 
changed, and whether building a (more) recent development version was 
needed to test changes, or verify that they would not break existing code.

The change is documented, but unfortunately the file that documented the 
changes has itself disappeared.

May be bringing back a dummy NEWS file that tells a bit about the 
situation would save time to some users. May be it could contain
something like:

# The NEWS file is now generated from other files
# To build it, do:
cd doc
make ../NEWS
cd ..

(or have a new target "NEWS" in the root Makefile ?)


L.

Laurent <lgautier <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> Dear R-developpers,
> 
> The file NEWS disappeared in r5243, and the authoritative source of 
> information for what has changed in R is in ./doc/NEWS.Rd.
> 
> A quick glance at NEWS was extremely helpful for knowing what has 
> changed, and whether building a (more) recent development version was 
> needed to test changes, or verify that they would not break existing code.
 [snip to make Gmane happy]

  Agreed.  This change also breaks the link on the R developers
page:

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

although one can still, sort of, get to the information via

http://developer.r-project.org/RSSfeeds.html