[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 2 June 2015 at 11:25, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| On 02/06/2015 11:05 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| > Hi Kurt,
| >
| > On 1 June 2015 at 14:02, Kurt Hornik wrote:
| > | >>>>> peter dalgaard writes:
| > |
| > | >> On 30 May 2015, at 01:20 , Imanuel Costigan <i.costigan at me.com> wrote:
| > | >>
| > | >> So I assume this commit means NEWS.md is now no longer on blacklist?
| > | >>
| > |
| > | > ....in the development version. Not true of released versions.
| > |
| > | Now also in r-patched.
| >
| > Nice.
| >
| > Now, is there a way for package authors to preview how a .md would be
| > rendered?  I wrote mine with GitHub in mind, and they render fine. I looked a
| > recently-uploaded README.md of mine on CRAN, and it got some of the pandoc-y
| > parts wrong --- and looks unprofessional.
| >
| > I would like to avoid that.  How can I?
| 
| In the short term, you should probably try to run pandoc with the same 
| version and options as CRAN.  Kurt, can you say what these are?  If you 
| (Dirk) know pandoc options that emulate Github, it would probably make 
| sense for CRAN to use those.
| 
| In the longer term, the plan is to include our own parser and renderer.  
| At that point this would be easy.

Thumbs up -- the 'rmarkdown' package by JJ et al basically already does just
this, and I have now authored a few (beamer) presentations that way.  And
quite like it.  It is all fully scriptable -- and of course available
interactive in whatever R shell you prefer -- and only requires pandoc
besides what is on CRAN.   Maybe medium-term Jeroen's commonmark can replace
pandoc and then we'd fully based on CRAN packages.

Dirk


-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org