[Rd] Wishlist: Vignettes on CRAN

Dirk Eddelbuettel edd at debian.org
Tue May 23 05:37:10 CEST 2006


On 22 May 2006 at 23:24, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
| This would certainly be nice.
| 
| Note that the BioConductor package vignettes are online:
|    http://www.bioconductor.org/docs/vignettes.html
| but there is nothing comparable for CRAN.
| 
| In some cases the package has a home page mentioned in the
| URL field of the DESCRIPTION file and following that can sometimes
| get vignette or other information although I agree we really need
| a standardized way to discover that a vignette exists and to access
| it without installing the package.
| 
| It would also be nice to be able to access the ChangeLog or NEWS
| file online as well as from the installed package.  Currently one has
| to download and unpack the source to get it in many cases and even
| then one can't even be sure that it exists.  That's even worse than
| the sitution with vignettes.

If we agreed on a (voluntary, of course) format and location for NEWS and/or
ChangeLog, then it would be easy to parse these from freshly uploaded files
and do value-added tricks like RSS feeds of changes, new uploads, ...

Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison



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