[Rd] Testing before release (was: edit() doubles backslashes when keep.source=TRUE)

Duncan Murdoch
2020-05-15T14:53:57Z

On 15/05/2020 9:41 a.m., Martin Maechler wrote:
[ deletions ]
> <whining>
>
>      Why does nobody anymore  help R development by working with
>      "R-devel", or at least then the alpha, beta and the
"RC"
>      (Release Candidate) versions that we release daily for about one
>      month before the final release?
>
>      Notably a highly staffed enterprise such as Rstudio (viz the bug
>      report 17800 above), but also others could really help by
>      starting to use the "next version" of R on a routine basis
...
>
> <whining/
I understand the whining, bugs that get released are embarrassing.  But
when I read the NEWS, I can see that both the NEW FEATURES and BUG FIXES
sections of x.y.0 releases tend to be much longer than the BUG FIXES
sections in patch releases.  That seems to indicate that things are
working reasonably well.

For a really rough measure, just counting bullet points:

R 4.0.0:  65 new features, 55 bug fixes

R 3.6.3:  1 new feature, 7 bug fixes

R 3.6.2:  2 new features, 21 bug fixes

R 3.6.1:  0 new features, 16 bug fixes

R 3.6.0:  72 new features, 62 bug fixes

You can get these numbers programmatically:

R4 <- news()
table(R4$Category)

R3 <- news(package = "R-3")
table(R3$Version, R3$Category)

Duncan Murdoch