ChangeLog for R packages {was "Wish list"}

Tue, Jan 20, 2004 3:40 PM

Yes, for an arbitrary project, the CVS log files may not be good enough or
may be too verbose.  The generated logs may still need some hand editing to
be given to clients.

OTOH, now that I know that I'm going to use cvs2cl, the quality and style of
my CVS log entries has gotten better.

Finally, it shouldn't be too hard to parse the XML and provide links to the
appropriate CVS web view...

-G

-----Original Message-----
From: rossini@blindglobe.net [mailto:rossini@blindglobe.net]
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 2:49 PM
To: Warnes, Gregory R
Cc: 'Dirk Eddelbuettel'; Duncan Murdoch; Martin Maechler; r-devel
Subject: Re: [Rd] ChangeLog for R packages {was "Wish list"}


"Warnes, Gregory R" <gregory_r_warnes@groton.pfizer.com> writes:

I've been using a cvs2cl.pl

(http://www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl), a nice little

perl script to auto-generate GNU-style 
changelogs from CVS log information.

This site also has a proposed XML format for changelogs,

and cvs2cl can

optionally produce this instead.  Finally, they have an

XSLT sylesheet that

will convert the XML changlong format into an HTML/XHTML page.

How about we borrow this tool and perhaps XML format for R?

That makes the assumption that there is worthwhile log messages in
CVS.  

In 2 related projects, we are looking at 75% (with ESS) and much less,
maybe 20-25% (BioConductor) of useful and informative log mesages in
CVS.

I'm not precisely sure how well R compares -- a quick check of various
files, based on anoncvs access, suggests that it's pretty good,
assuming that you have cvs access (anonymous or otherwise) to
translate the sometimes terse descriptions.  Compare with
bioconductor, where some of the check-in comments are completely
useless without corresponding diff's (which of course, are completely
self explanatory :-).

best,
-tony

-- 
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