Link to NEWS.2 in NEWS is broken

I think Kurt has this in hand since the same issue affected
src/base/NEWS.html. The fix seems to be just not to copy the html formatted
NEWS to the file distribution folders and have any links in there point to
doc/manuals/r-release/NEWS.html instead. The relative links to the parent
directory would be a pain to sort out.

(Cc: Kurt, as he may not be aware that there is a fix to apply to
bin/windows/base/index.html as well.)

-pd

On 20 Jan 2015, at 13:05 , Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
wrote:

Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com>
   on Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:30:56 +0200 writes:

I am not sure where to post this.

Maybe you could try to contact the CRAN maintainer by e-mail.
(E-mail: you know the thing people did before they "posted" everything

:-) ;-))

but I agree that it is not easy to find e-mail addresses nowadays..

More seriously:  Thank you, Tal!

I am looking at the NEWS file here:
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/NEWS.R-3.1.2.html
And the links at the bottom seem to be broken.
This link:
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/NEWS.2

Should be this:
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/NEWS.2

well, there yes.

If you look at the more typical place of the NEWS,
which you get to quickly from the Main CRAN or R-project web
page, namely
     http://www.r-project.org/news.html
and its bottom link
   http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/NEWS.html

then on the bottom of that pakage, there, even the ...../NEWS.2.html

fails.

CHANGES in previous versions
-
Older news can be found in text format in files NEWS.0
<http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/NEWS.0>, NEWS.1
<http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/NEWS.1> and NEWS.2
<http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/NEWS.2> in the ?doc? directory.
News in HTML format for *R* versions from 2.10.0 to 2.15.3 is in
NEWS.2.html <http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/NEWS.2.html>.

As you probably know these are all autogenerated from the
source file  <Rsrc>/doc/NEWS.Rd

 ((and so there is some reason why posting to R-devel may be somewhat

ok))

and the relevant part of that is

\section{CHANGES in previous versions}{
 \itemize{
   \item Older news can be found in text format in files
   \ifelse{html}{\href{../NEWS.0}{NEWS.0}, \href{../NEWS.1}{NEWS.1}
     and \href{../NEWS.2}{NEWS.2}}{\file{NEWS.0}, \file{NEWS.1} and
     \file{NEWS.2}}
   in the \file{doc} directory.  News in HTML format for
   \R versions from 2.10.0 to 2.15.3 is in
   \ifelse{html}{\url{NEWS.2.html}}{\file{doc/html/NEWS.2.html}}.
 }
}

*and* that source produces a NEWS.html which works correctly in
the important use of R's "builtin HTML help",
i.e. for me what I get after help.start(),  I presume that's
also the toplevel help page Rstudio users see.
And there, the "../NEWS.O" (relative link) *is* the correct location.

Using relative links is a very good idea here, as all that
should work completely offline.

The task here is to adapt all the other "published" versions of the
generated NEWS.html files to point to a web (as opposed to
local/relative) URL.

Yes ``just another'' tweak for the CRAN web page generation
scripts...

Martin

--
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com