[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> Duncan Murdoch writes:

> On 22/05/2015 8:49 PM, Imanuel Costigan wrote:
>> Are there any plans for CRAN to support NEWS files in markdown? Bit of a hassle to go the the package’s Github (or other like) site to read NEWS.

> Not as far as I know.  There have been discussions about increasing the
> support of Markdown, but so far the conclusion has been that it's too
> hard to do -- the support is not stable enough on all the platforms
> where R runs.

There are actually two issues here.

For CRAN, we could in principle take inst/NEWS.md files, convert these
to HTML using pandoc, and use the HTML for the package web page.  (Would
need the CRAN incoming checks to be taught about inst/NEWS.md.)

However, we cannot use such files for utils::news() because we do not
(yet?) know how to reliably parse such files and extract the news items
(and hence cannot really compute on the news information).

Btw, currently only one package on CRAN has inst/NEWS.md (another one
has NEWS.md at top level).

Best
-k

> Markdown is allowed for vignettes (because the package author processes
> those), so I'd suggest putting your news into a vignette instead of a
> news file.  Put in a token news file that points to the vignette so
> users can find it.

> Duncan Murdoch

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