On 28 August 2013 at 09:44, Hadley Wickham wrote: | >> Related rant: I really wish we had "CHANGES" file, or a section in the | >> manuals. It is virtually impossible to look at a current "Writing R | >> Extensions" manual, and a previous one, in order to get a succinct view of | >> what changed. Having to diff the NEWS files, or glancing at commit logs | >> via | >> the RCS is a very poor proxy. | > | > I don't understand the difference between the CHANGES file you are asking | > for and the NEWS file. Do you want something in purely chronological order, | > rather than categorized as NEWS is? | | I think Dirk was talking about a CHANGES/NEWS file for "Writing R extensions"
Yup. In the sense of "something to look at to see what one may need to change". Eg for Debian, the "Policy" document has a version number making discussion / comparison and reference more tangible. Also, if/when an update is made, an 'upgrade checklist' is provided -- see eg [1] for the most recent annoucement [2] for the policy manual web presence, and [3] for the complete checklist with a roll-back history. I am not suggesting this exact format. I am merely pointing that it (currently) takes a couple of extra steps to stay on top of required changes, which in turn leads to everybody just uploading to CRAN as a trial, which in turn overburdens the CRAN maintainers. Seems suboptimal to me. Dirk [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/09/msg00006.html [2] http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#policy [3] http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/upgrading-checklist.txt -- Dirk Eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
