[R-pkg-devel] Changes to checks on NEWS?

? Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:37:38 -0400
J C Nash <profjcnash at gmail.com> ?????:

I'd like to avoid NOTEs if possible, and since I'm using a plain-text
NEWS, don't believe this should trigger one.

Plain-text NEWS files are parsed according to the rules specified in
help(news), which is admittedly laconic in its description. If you run
tools:::.news_reader_default('https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/optimx/NEWS')
(or news(package = 'optimx')), you can see that R's news() already
misunderstands some of the contents of your NEWS file.

A relatively recent change (r82543, July 2022) set
_R_CHECK_NEWS_IN_PLAIN_TEXT_=TRUE for R CMD check --as-cran and started
verifying that R's plain text "news reader" function could actually
parse plain-text NEWS files without warnings or errors.

I think that if you rename NEWS to ChangeLog, R will leave the file
alone, but CRAN will offer it to users as plain text.

Best regards,
Ivan