[Bioc-devel] knowing what is changed/new in release patches

Kasper,

Yes, right, the NEWS file.

In practice I find that the NEWS files are often not updated between patch releases in the 'release' version.

Spot checking a list of packages that I just updated, I find some that don't have info on patch level changes, some that have a news file but whose must current entry is for an old release, and one that DOes have patch level NEWS (yeah!), and one whose NEWS is old.

For example:

no patch level release entry in NEWS
'GenomicRanges'
'IRanges'

patch level entry in NEWS
edgeR

newest NEWS is old
VariantAnnotation

I guess what I want is svn log available from web/RSS.

Any hopes out there?

Thx

~Malcolm

-----Original Message-----
From: Kasper Daniel Hansen [mailto:kasperdanielhansen at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2012 2:32 PM
To: Cook, Malcolm
Cc: Bioconductor Newsgroup (bioconductor at stat.math.ethz.ch); bioc-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Bioc-devel] knowing what is changed/new in release patches

A package may choose to provide a NEWS file which you should be able
to access using
   news(package = "IRanges")
(you can also ask for news added after a given version number, the
query above lists the entire file).  It is optional to include and it
is optional how detailed it is, but this is intended to be a readable
summary of changes.

For this reason, I very strongly suggests that all packages include
such a file.  Unfortunately, it is easy to forget to update.

Aside from this, svn log is your only friend.

Kasper

On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Cook, Malcolm <MEC at stowers.org> wrote:

Is there a generic way to learn what is changed or new in a "released" package since its release?

For instance, IRanges was released as 1.16.0 but is now at 1.16.4.

I'd like to know what was changed in this released version.

I do already know that I can monitor changes to devel with either
        http://www.bioconductor.org/developers/svnlog/ or its RSS feed.
And I do.
And this is very useful.

However, I don't know how to do this to the release version (i.e. to learn what changes to devel were deemed sufficiently

important to merit a patch release to devel), other than check out the svn and use diff, which I don't want to have to do (at least for
now).

Am I missing something?

Any pointers?

Thanks!

Malcolm Cook
Computational Biology - Stowers Institute for Medical Research