[R-pkg-devel] cran submission check produces note on news file

On Sun, 7 Aug 2022 06:16:30 +0900

I just submitted a version of this package to CRAN, and got a Note on
the debian check that showed that it could not process the NEWS file.
All other system pretests (including Windows and MAC) were fine, and
my own checks on Mac, Ubuntu, and Windows had no such issues. 

I seem to be able to reproduce the errors by setting options(verbose
= TRUE) and then trying to parse the NEWS file with
tools:::.news_reader_default('https://r-forge.r-project.org/scm/viewvc.php/*checkout*/pkg/NEWS?revision=95&root=lefko3').
(It's not a documented entry point, but it's what gets called to read
the news database for your package.)

A plain text NEWS file is supposed to follow a format described in
?news. Your NEWS file looks like Markdown; in fact,
tools:::.build_news_db_from_package_NEWS_md('https://r-forge.r-project.org/scm/viewvc.php/*checkout*/pkg/NEWS?revision=95&root=lefko3')
parses it without producing error messages (so renaming NEWS into
NEWS.md could work around your immediate problems), but the result
doesn't look well: each numbered list is collapsed into a single
paragraph. Try separating the subsections (e.g. "NEW FEATURES" and
"USER-VISIBLE CHANGES") into separate Markdown paragraphs with
double-newlines and following other recommendations for Markdown news
files in ?news.

Best regards,
Ivan