[R] where are the NEWS for R <3.0.0?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 19/12/2014, 5:48 PM, Ben Marwick wrote:
> I'm looking for the NEWS files for versions of R before 3.0.0, does 
> anyone know where they are? I'm interested in getting the names of 
> people who have been acknowledged when changes are made to R.
> 
> At the bottom of http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/NEWS.html it says
> 
> "Older news can be found in text format in files NEWS.0, NEWS.1 and 
> NEWS.2 in the ‘doc’ directory. News in HTML format for R versions from 
> 2.10.0 to 2.15.3 is in NEWS.2.html."
> 
> The text includes these URLs:
> 
> http://cran.r-project.org/src/NEWS.0
> http://cran.r-project.org/src/NEWS.1
> http://cran.r-project.org/src/NEWS.2
> http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/NEWS.2.html
> 
> All of these go to 404s, and when src is replaced by doc, as suggested 
> by the text, they also go to 404s. There are no NEWS files in here 
> either: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/html/ So there are a bunch of 
> broken links here.

If you read these from within the HTML help system in R, the links
aren't broken.  CRAN copied some of the files from there, but not all.

You can also find the files in the RHOME/doc directory (and subdirectories).

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> I found a bunch of PDFs listed here http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/ 
> dating from 2008-2001. Are these only source of the earlier NEWS files?
> 
> They're less convenient because the NEWS section is not a single plain 
> text file, but a section of the PDF document. I'd be most grateful to 
> know where I can find html or txt files of the earlier NEWS files. If 
> the PDFs are all there are, it would be good to know that for sure.
> 
> The other method I was considering was scraping bugzilla for names of 
> people who submitted bugs that resulted in a fix 
> (https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/buglist.cgi?product=R&query_format=advanced&resolution=FIXED). 
> But text mining the NEWS files would be quicker for a first approximation.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Ben
>