I agree. It is not worth all the trouble just to save the "bit of hassle to go to the package's Github site". In fact, the release notes on Github are more meaningful than a plain text NEWS.md or even a converted NEWS.html from Pandoc, e.g. you can include bug report numbers and attribute to users by @username (they all have hyperlinks attached on them, so it is easy to see more details of bugs/features if one really cares). Personally, I feel it is very worthwhile going to Github and reading the release notes there. I'd be unhappy with converting NEWS.md to NEWS.html by Pandoc. I know not all people use Github, but I feel if a package author has a NEWS.md, chances are this package is on Github.
Re Kurt's analysis of NEWS.md on CRAN, I guess that is because R CMD check will warn against NEWS.md at the top level. I know a lot of packages on Github have the NEWS.md file, and it has been removed from the tarball to make R CMD check happy. Regards, Yihui -- Yihui Xie <xieyi...@gmail.com> Web: http://yihui.name On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 8:25 AM, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.ga...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> > wrote: > [...] > >> I think the harder problem is display. CRAN can run pandoc, but can >> users who install the package from source? I would expect some obscure >> platforms (like Windows ;-) would not have it available. >> > [...] > > I don't think pandoc is the best way to go with NEWS.md (and README.md, > actually). I would be surprised if many package maintainer built their > NEWS/README files with pandoc. They just look at them at GitHub (or another > similar service). > > GitHub has API for building HTML from MarkDown: > https://developer.github.com/v3/markdown/ > It can build GitHub-flavored MarkDown, in which case you get links to > GitHub issues, etc. or just plain MarkDown, like a GitHub README. > > If you don't want to rely on their service, then there are a multitude of > lightweight MarkDown parsers available, e.g. > https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it is a good one IMO. > > Pandoc is great for vignettes, but you don't need its full power for > READMEs and especially not for NEWS files. In fact most NEWS.md files look > good as text. > > Gabor ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel