was: Problem building (binary) packages for Windows

Dear Martin, Uwe and Brian

thanks for your comments --- point taken:

On Sat, 16 May 2009, Martin Maechler wrote:

"UweL" == Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
    on Fri, 15 May 2009 20:48:03 +0200 writes:
            

[.............]   

    >> Thank you for clarifying this and once again apologies for stirring you
    >> up with something that had been fixed in the mean-time already.

    UweL> For R-devel, it is in the svn logs. Since it may change again, NEWS is 
    UweL> not always edited while things are tested.

well, and if a new feature is introduced, it gets a NEWS entry
(hopefully), but if the new feature contains bugs, these will be
fixed of course with*OUT* another NEWS entry.

Indeed, the NEWS apply to (eventually) released versions of R,
so fixing transient bugs is *never* documented in NEWS.
  

Convinced.

And to make this clear:
I did not mean at all to criticize any development undertaken in R-devel
---
you are all doing a great job in enhancing R, and you deserve all due
acknowledgement for this.

My point was rather that instead of keeping one's own checkout
repository of the R project's svn archives, it would help somehow
to make changes visible / accesible more easily ---
of course without bothering R core developers to actively maintain
this, but rather do this in an automatic way.

Embarrasingly enough, now that you have explained to me the
different purposes of NEWS and svn logs, I realized that there
already  is

    http://developer.r-project.org/R.svnlog.2008

(the name of which might get updated to
   ..../R.svnlog.2009, though)

Still, one might improve upon this without to much effort,
I think. Possible starting points could be

(1) webSVN + trac access to the R subversion repository
(2) using some r-forge type architecture for R core as well,
     --- in particular for the source code management provided there
(3) setting up an RSS feed for the svn logs ---- not unlike
     http://developer.r-project.org/blosxom.cgi/R-devel

As one more step ahead one could think of

(4) merging corresponding RSS feeds for CHANGES, NEWS,
and the svn logs in order to see all changes on one spot.

Do you think setting up any of these items would be hard
to establish?

Maybe this is already done; but I have not been aware of this.

... leading us back to what Brian already said:

  >>  'Under development' needs to be taken seriously.

if asked, I would have agreed before, and surely now do
even more so...

Thanks again, best
Peter