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

5 messages · Ivan Krylov, John C Nash, Duncan Murdoch

Original
John C Nash
# 
In work on an upgrade to my optimx package, I added to my (plain text) NEWS
file.

The lines

VERSION 2023-06-25

       o This is a MAJOR revision and overhaul of the optimx package and its components.
       o Fixed CITATION file based on R CMD check --as-cran complaints
         regarding requirement for person() and bibentry() changes.

pass R CMD check --as-cran

but

VERSION 2023-06-25

     This is a MAJOR revision and overhaul of the optimx package and its components.
       o Fixed CITATION file based on R CMD check --as-cran complaints
         regarding requirement for person() and bibentry() changes.

give a NOTE that news cannot process the chunk/lines in NEWS.

R CMD check    passes. (i.e., CRAN checks are tripping the NOTE).

I don't see anything about this in Writing R Extensions at moment.

Does anyone have information on what may have changed. I'd like to avoid NOTEs if possible,
and since I'm using a plain-text NEWS, don't believe this should trigger one.

The version that passes was the result of some almost random tries to see what would
trigger a note.

Cheers,

John Nash
Ivan Krylov
# 
? Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:37:38 -0400
J C Nash <profjcnash at gmail.com> ?????:
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.
John C Nash
# 
Thanks for the info, though it seems odd that CRAN wants to
parse a plain text file that is purely for information, since it
should have no impact on the current package or any other. I suppose
there might be character set issues to check. The motive for parsing
it eludes me.

Does anyone know if there are plans to use NEWS for some purpose in
the future i.e., to actually track changes beyond package maintainer's
comments?

Cheers, and thanks again.

JN
On 2023-07-26 10:03, Ivan Krylov wrote:
Duncan Murdoch
#
On 26/07/2023 10:18 a.m., J C Nash wrote:
NEWS has been used for a long time by the utils::news() function, which 
in turn is used by the HTML help system.

Duncan Murdoch
John C Nash
# 
The important information is in the body of the man page for news(),
i.e., found by
    ?utils::news

and this explains why putting an "o" in front of a line clears the
NOTE. Once I realized that CRAN is running this, I could see the
"why". Thanks.

JN
On 2023-07-26 10:25, Duncan Murdoch wrote: