ChangeLog for R packages {was "Wish list"}

-----Original Message-----
From: Dirk Eddelbuettel [mailto:edd@debian.org]
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 1:05 PM
To: Duncan Murdoch
Cc: Martin Maechler; r-devel
Subject: Re: [Rd] ChangeLog for R packages {was "Wish list"}


On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 11:33:13AM -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 08:49:34 +0100, Martin Maechler
<maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote :

"Of course" "R CMD check" would have the harder job of also have
to work properly on non-Debian, non-Linux, even non-Unix systems..
For Windows, there's already the filename capitalization mess.

Just as long as the filenames are case-insensitively unique, we're
okay.  So no changelog coexisting with ChangeLog.

Right. I'd conjecture that it is effectively the same on 
Unix, i.e. I can't
see any sane project using both changelog and ChangeLog.

   Dirk> Would that help?  In order to parse a Changelog, we'd
   Dirk> need a common format.  We could start with the
   Dirk> standard emacs mode (with vi or, mercy on them,
   Dirk> notepad users can emulate free-hand).  Or is all this
   Dirk> too restrictive?

I would be very much in favor of this.  But then I'm biased:
Using Emacs 100% and using ChangeLog's for most of my packages
{for those who don't know: "C-x 4 a" = 

add-change-log-entry-other-window

 this works even from an PKG/R/foo.R file, adding to toplevel
 PKG/ChangeLog, automatically inserting the R/foo.R filename
 (and a function name) there.
}

As long as we give clear documentation about what the format should
be, and it's not too obscure, I don't see a problem for 

Windows users

And let's not forget that Emacs and XEmacs are available on 
Windows (in
various 'standard' or 'cygwin' flavours) 

here.  Non-Windows users (and the INSTALL script) should be prepared
to handle CR-LF line terminations, because not all editors make it
easy to avoid those; there's also the possibility of the 

last line not

being terminated.  But those are easy problems with standard
solutions.

Sounds good.

Dirk

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