NEWS file (was faqs)

On Nov 14, 2007, at 11:55 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

inst/NEWS would have the advantage of consistency with R itself  
which also has a NEWS file.

I vote for NEWS for reasons above plus because that's what I use in my  
packages already ;).
IMHO it should be installed automatically if present, i.e. it  
shouldn't be necessary to have it in inst/NEWS, just plain NEWS should  
suffice.

Cheers,
Simon

On Nov 14, 2007 10:15 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

On 14/11/2007 8:53 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

Another possibility is to just place it at the end of the vignette.
That is where it is in the proto package:

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/vignettes/proto/proto.pdf

Package documentation is already quite scattered and adding
a faq() command would add just one more thing one has
to do.  Here are some places one might look already for
documentation:

package?mypackage

Or just ?mypackage.  Writing R Extensions recommends package? 
mypackage,
with ?mypackage also working if that name isn't taken.  However, the
advice is ignored more than it is followed.

vignette(...)
library(help = mypackage)
?mycommand
home page
WISHLIST file
NEWS file
THANKS file
svn log

I personally would give a much higher priority to a standardized
place to find change information.  Some packages provide it.
Some don't which is very frustrating since you see a new version
and have no idea what has changed.  If they do document it you
often have to download the source just to get at the change  
information.

Where do you put it?  I put it in inst/ChangeLog, which ends up
installed in the package root as ChangeLog.

Whenever this has come up in the past, there have been several
proposals, but no consensus.  So, to encourage consensus, I've got a
proposal:

Why don't we vote on a location, with every voter agreeing to  
follow the
majority?  The only condition I'd put on it is that it should be
something that gets installed, hence somewhere in inst, but I'd be  
happy
to change the name if ChangeLog doesn't win.

My vote is for inst/ChangeLog.

Duncan Murdoch

On Nov 14, 2007 8:22 PM, roger koenker  
<roger at ysidro.econ.uiuc.edu> wrote:

An extremely modest proposal:

It would be nice if packages could have a FAQ and if

      faq(package.name)

would produce this faq.  And if, by default

      faq()
      FAQ()

would produce the admirable R faq...  Apologies in advance
if there is already a mechanism like this, but help.search()
didn't reveal anything.

url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger                Roger Koenker
email   rkoenker at uiuc.edu                       Department of  
Economics
vox:    217-333-4558                            University of  
Illinois
fax:    217-244-6678                            Champaign, IL 61820