Issue tracking in packages [was: Re: [R] change in read.spss, package foreign?]

I personally put NEWS, WISHLIST and THANKS files in the 'inst'
directory of all my source packages.  This has the effect of copying them to the
top level of the built version so that they are accessible from R via:

I'm not sure that WISHLIST and THANKS need to be available to people who 
haven't installed the package.   NEWS, on the other hand, really does.

One option (if it doesn't turn out to be too much work for the CRAN 
maintainers) would be to have an optional Changelog field in the 
DESCRIPTION file giving the relative path to the file. This would mean 
that maintainers would not all have to switch to the same format.
eg for foreign
   Changelog: ChangeLog
and for survey
   Changelog: inst/NEWS

This might be enough to make it easy for CRAN to display these when the 
maintainer provides them.

 	-thomas