Issue tracking in packages [was: Re: [R] change in read.spss, package foreign?]
On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
On 9/10/05, Thomas Lumley <tlumley at u.washington.edu> wrote:
On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
And one more comment. The DESCRIPTION file does not record the location or existence of the various subdirectories such as R, man, exec, etc. If NEWS is to be recorded as a meta data line item in DESCRIPTION then surely all of these should be too so its symmetric and they are all on an equal footing (or else none of them should be, which in fact I think is preferable).
I don't see any advantage in symmetry. The locations of these
The present discussion is where the change information may be located but that is also true of the source and other information. We could just as easily have a field in the DESCRIPTION that tells the build where to find the R source. Its really the same issue.
There are two important differences 1/ No existing package has its source anywhere other than in the R subdirectory. Existing packages have their change logs in different places and different formats. 2/ Having source code where it will not be found must be an error -- making the source code available to R *cannot* be optional. Making a change log available *must* be optional. -thomas