Re: [Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha

[Gábor Csárdi]

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:40 PM, Uwe Ligges  wrote:

> Thanks for letting us know about the new website. Some comments:





- Download statistics: Where are they from? CRAN does not monitor downloads
> generally, maybe some selected mirrors do.
>

It's the RStudio mirror only. It is mentioned on the Services page and on
the page of the download count API. It should probably be on the main page,
but 'Most downloaded from the RStudio mirror' sounded very clumsy, even if
it is correct. Anyway, I'll put it there in some form in a minute.

Btw. I do not think this statistics is the best:
- single mirror, although this is the least of my concerns to be honest.
- if a package is updated frequently, then it is downloaded more
frequently, even if it is not used by more people.
- if a popular package depends on another one, that is downloaded often,
too. Even if it is not used much directly. You would probably want to rank
down these packages  a bit in the search result list. A good example is my
'rversions' package, that is trending like crazy, but nobody really wants
it, only the last version of 'devtools' depends on it.

Ideally, I would want to count the number of 'install.packages()'
invocations, and this is actually technically easy without tracking anyone.
Is CRAN open to talk about this?

- Section "Recently updated" can only hold 9 packages, but frequently more
> than 9 get accepted even within an hour, hence not sure if this makes sense.
>

Click on "Recently updated", and you get the latest 100. You can get even
more with the API, if you want.


> - The links "Download R" and "CRAN homepage" point to a particular link of
> a mirror rather than the official pages. I'd appreciate if you do not link
> to selected mirrors. The R homepage on purpose links to
> http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html when pointing to CRAN.
>

Good points, I'll fix these. I put in that mirror, because it was fast, and
it is bound to be fast from anywhere in the world, whereas the main site
was sluggish from my location at that time.

Thanks!
Gabor

Best,
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
>
> On 24.05.2015 11:44, Rainer M Krug wrote:
>
>> Gábor Csárdi  writes:
>>
>>  Dear All,
>>>
>>> [ I was wondering if this should have gone to the new mailing list.
>>> Maybe. ]
>>>
>>> As some of you maybe know from my earlier posts, I am building a simple
>>> search engine for R packages. Now the search engine has a proper web
>>> site,
>>> where you can also browse CRAN packages.
>>>
>>> http://www.r-pkg.org/
>>>
>>> As I see the value is in
>>> 1. package search (search box on top right)
>>> 2. APIs, see http://www.r-pkg.org/services
>>>
>>> It is in alpha version, meaning that things seem to work, some pages are
>>> a
>>> bit slow and there are a lot of glitches to fix.
>>>
>>
>> I had a quick peek, and it looks really nice! I particularly think the
>> github integration for diff-ing versions can be very use full!
>>
>> It might be an idea, to also add R itself to the github repo for
>> diff-ing?
>>
>> Thanks a lot,
>>
>> Rainer
>>
>>
>>> Please tell me what you think.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Gabor
>>>
>>> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> __
>> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>>

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Re: [Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Uwe,

On 25 May 2015 at 01:40, Uwe Ligges wrote:
| Thanks for letting us know about the new website. Some comments:
| 
| - Download statistics: Where are they from? CRAN does not monitor 
| downloads generally, maybe some selected mirrors do.

This is the "standard" data set which has been provided by RStudio based on
the downloads from their 0-cloud content-delivery network.

This is not new; if you ever looked at rdocumentation.org (the nice and
useful site by the datacamp folks), they show(ed?) time-series plots of
downloads on the per-package pages.

Gabor has worked for quite some time on nice databasing of these number and
APIs.  He by now has a boatload of repositories at GitHub. For more on
download stats, see eg http://cranlogs.r-pkg.org/ and follow the API docs.

| - Section "Recently updated" can only hold 9 packages, but frequently 
| more than 9 get accepted even within an hour, hence not sure if this 
| makes sense.

C'est la vie.

For any cutoff one suggests, someone else will suggest that the number may be
exceeded. I on the other hand find the site nicely symmetric offering 'top
nine' in all three sections.

| - The links "Download R" and "CRAN homepage" point to a particular link 
| of a mirror rather than the official pages. I'd appreciate if you do not 
| link to selected mirrors. The R homepage on purpose links to 
| http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html when pointing to CRAN.

It may not be so clearcut. As previously discussed, I happen to take the
other side here. I have long changed my scripts and settings on various
machines as the CDN is _clearly_ superior in performance to the various US
mirror I used over the years, some as hardcoded names, some as DNS
round-robin or preference wrappers (eg cran.us.r-project.org).

And by pointing to the "cloud" CDN I don't even need to change the entries
on, say, my laptop when I travel to Europe.  Also, given the popularity and
load on CRAN, I can assure you that throughput is better at cran.rstudio.com.

Hth,  Dirk

| 
| Best,
| Uwe Ligges
| 
| 
| 
| On 24.05.2015 11:44, Rainer M Krug wrote:
| > Gábor Csárdi  writes:
| >
| >> Dear All,
| >>
| >> [ I was wondering if this should have gone to the new mailing list. Maybe. 
]
| >>
| >> As some of you maybe know from my earlier posts, I am building a simple
| >> search engine for R packages. Now the search engine has a proper web site,
| >> where you can also browse CRAN packages.
| >>
| >> http://www.r-pkg.org/
| >>
| >> As I see the value is in
| >> 1. package search (search box on top right)
| >> 2. APIs, see http://www.r-pkg.org/services
| >>
| >> It is in alpha version, meaning that things seem to work, some pages are a
| >> bit slow and there are a lot of glitches to fix.
| >
| > I had a quick peek, and it looks really nice! I particularly think the
| > github integration for diff-ing versions can be very use full!
| >
| > It might be an idea, to also add R itself to the github repo for
| > diff-ing?
| >
| > Thanks a lot,
| >
| > Rainer
| >
| >>
| >> Please tell me what you think.
| >>
| >> Best,
| >> Gabor
| >>
| >>[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
| >>
| >
| >
| >
| > __
| > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
| > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
| >
| 
| __
| R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
| https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org

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Re: [Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha

[Uwe Ligges]

Thanks for letting us know about the new website. Some comments:

- Download statistics: Where are they from? CRAN does not monitor 
downloads generally, maybe some selected mirrors do.
- Section "Recently updated" can only hold 9 packages, but frequently 
more than 9 get accepted even within an hour, hence not sure if this 
makes sense.
- The links "Download R" and "CRAN homepage" point to a particular link 
of a mirror rather than the official pages. I'd appreciate if you do not 
link to selected mirrors. The R homepage on purpose links to 
http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html when pointing to CRAN.


Best,
Uwe Ligges



On 24.05.2015 11:44, Rainer M Krug wrote:

Gábor Csárdi  writes:


Dear All,

[ I was wondering if this should have gone to the new mailing list. Maybe. ]

As some of you maybe know from my earlier posts, I am building a simple
search engine for R packages. Now the search engine has a proper web site,
where you can also browse CRAN packages.

http://www.r-pkg.org/

As I see the value is in
1. package search (search box on top right)
2. APIs, see http://www.r-pkg.org/services

It is in alpha version, meaning that things seem to work, some pages are a
bit slow and there are a lot of glitches to fix.


I had a quick peek, and it looks really nice! I particularly think the
github integration for diff-ing versions can be very use full!

It might be an idea, to also add R itself to the github repo for
diff-ing?

Thanks a lot,

Rainer



Please tell me what you think.

Best,
Gabor

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Re: [Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha

[Tim Triche, Jr.]

> Please tell me what you think.

I think it is awesome, just like the CRAN-github bridge.

It would be cool if you provided CRAN authors with instructions on how to
fork the CRAN-github clones of the source code so that I don't have to
retarget pull requests ;-)

In conclusion, keep up the great work


Statistics is the grammar of science.
Karl Pearson 

On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 7:02 AM, Gábor Csárdi 
wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> [ I was wondering if this should have gone to the new mailing list. Maybe.
> ]
>
> As some of you maybe know from my earlier posts, I am building a simple
> search engine for R packages. Now the search engine has a proper web site,
> where you can also browse CRAN packages.
>
> http://www.r-pkg.org/
>
> As I see the value is in
> 1. package search (search box on top right)
> 2. APIs, see http://www.r-pkg.org/services
>
> It is in alpha version, meaning that things seem to work, some pages are a
> bit slow and there are a lot of glitches to fix.
>
> Please tell me what you think.
>
> Best,
> Gabor
>
> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> __
> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

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Re: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Jeroen Ooms]

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 4:01 AM, Duncan Murdoch
 wrote:
> The "markdown" package does some of what R would need to make use of Sundown, 
> but not all:  we really do need an R object representation of the parse tree, 
> for functions like news() to work with in the short term, and the help system 
> in the longer term.

John MacFarlane's reference implementation does provide the markdown
parsing tree, although by default it is only exposed in xml form. A
quick example:

  devtools::install_github("jeroenooms/commonmark")
  help(commonmark)

>From the xml tree you can easily extract news items using xpath, or we
could hack the libcmark library a bit to get the parse tree as an R
list.

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Re: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Kevin Ushey]

I like the idea of supporting a small, strict subset of Markdown that
can be used to translate from NEWS.md to NEWS.

Following from Yihui's example, it would be pretty easy to write a
parser in R for such a format (and I'd be willing to try implementing
one, if that would be of interest).

Kevin

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 10:20 AM, Yihui Xie  wrote:
> That is more or less what I had been doing for a long time (having
> both NEWS.md and NEWS), but decided not to do it any more last year.
> In fact, you can easily convert NEWS.md to a NEWS file that R's news()
> can understand, e.g.
> https://github.com/yihui/knitr/blob/947ad5fc94/Makefile#L8-L10 (if
> your NEWS.md is like this
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yihui/knitr/947ad5fc94/NEWS.md)
>
> I stopped doing this because as I said, I found Github release notes
> much more pleasant to read (https://github.com/yihui/knitr/releases),
> and I do not care much about the possibility that some users do not
> have internet connections when reading the NEWS (it is a legitimate
> concern, though). IMHO, it is totally worth it if we are talking about
> official support of Markdown in R's documentation system (.Rd files),
> and it is probably not worth the time and effort if we only want to
> support NEWS.md in particular. That is just a tiny problem compared to
> the effort of porting CommonMark or whatever Markdown rendering
> engines into R.
>
> Regards,
> Yihui
>
>
> On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Duncan Murdoch
>  wrote:
>>
>> I imagine GitHub users could have both NEWS.md and NEWS, with one being
>> a symlink to the other, and .Rbuildignore set to ignore NEWS.md.  Why
>> not try it, and post instructions for other Github users?  news() won't
>> be able to understand the headings, but it should display the file as a
>> bunch of text.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>
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Re: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Yihui Xie]

That is more or less what I had been doing for a long time (having
both NEWS.md and NEWS), but decided not to do it any more last year.
In fact, you can easily convert NEWS.md to a NEWS file that R's news()
can understand, e.g.
https://github.com/yihui/knitr/blob/947ad5fc94/Makefile#L8-L10 (if
your NEWS.md is like this
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yihui/knitr/947ad5fc94/NEWS.md)

I stopped doing this because as I said, I found Github release notes
much more pleasant to read (https://github.com/yihui/knitr/releases),
and I do not care much about the possibility that some users do not
have internet connections when reading the NEWS (it is a legitimate
concern, though). IMHO, it is totally worth it if we are talking about
official support of Markdown in R's documentation system (.Rd files),
and it is probably not worth the time and effort if we only want to
support NEWS.md in particular. That is just a tiny problem compared to
the effort of porting CommonMark or whatever Markdown rendering
engines into R.

Regards,
Yihui


On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Duncan Murdoch
 wrote:
>
> I imagine GitHub users could have both NEWS.md and NEWS, with one being
> a symlink to the other, and .Rbuildignore set to ignore NEWS.md.  Why
> not try it, and post instructions for other Github users?  news() won't
> be able to understand the headings, but it should display the file as a
> bunch of text.
>
> Duncan Murdoch

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Re: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 24/05/2015 7:20 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 23/05/2015 10:26 PM, Imanuel Costigan wrote:
>>
>>> On 24 May 2015, at 12:07 pm, Duncan Murdoch  
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 23/05/2015 9:15 PM, Imanuel Costigan wrote:
 While a parsed HTML version of the NEWS.md file would be nice, I would 
 like something much simpler: being able to "see” this file in the Help 
 pane in RStudio 
>>>
>>> That isn't really any simpler.  RStudio is just displaying HTML whenever
>>> it shows you anything in the Help pane.
>>
>> Ok yes, point taken. My post was more in relation to a short-term “fix” of 
>> being able to save the NEWS.md file in the package’s top level directory. 
>> Users could still be able to read it as a plain text file in their R session 
>> (esp. if they don’t have web access) AND be able to see the pretty marked up 
>> version on Github if they wished. At the moment, it isn’t possible to make 
>> this work without triggering CRAN errors (by storing it in the top-level) or 
>> losing the NEWS.md file from top level directory of the package (by saving 
>> to inst/) and making it less conventional / accessible on Github. Ideally, 
>> one should be able to get the best of both: save this in top-level directory 
>> and when necessary, just present it as a text file (at least until such time 
>> as Markdown is officially supported). 
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> or being about to run something like show_news(“packagename”). Duncan
>>> mentioned issues with the news() function being able to process metadata
>>> represented in the Md file. What is the motivation of this structure?
>>>
>>> I don't understand your question.  What issues did I mention?  Or are
>>> you talking about Kurt's post, who first mentioned news()?  And what
>>> structure are you talking about?
>>
>> Yes I was referring to Kurt’s comments. As I understand it, the short-term 
>> “fix” I outlined above wouldn’t work because news() expects a certain 
>> structure and can’t extract the elements that it expects from  Markdown 
>> files yet. What I am asking is why it isn’t possible / desirable for news() 
>> to simply print to the console the contents of `system.file(“NEWS.md”, 
>> package = “packagename”)`? For example, `news(package = “devtools”)` returns 
>> nothing because it uses “NEWS.md”. 
> 
> Short term fixes are generally a bad way to design software.  We should
> do this right if we do it at all.  It might require people using Github
> to change the way they do things, if that turns out to make more sense
> than accommodating them.

I imagine GitHub users could have both NEWS.md and NEWS, with one being
a symlink to the other, and .Rbuildignore set to ignore NEWS.md.  Why
not try it, and post instructions for other Github users?  news() won't
be able to understand the headings, but it should display the file as a
bunch of text.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
>>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
>>>


> On 24 May 2015, at 10:51 am, Baptiste Auguie  
> wrote:
>
> John MacFarlane, the author of Pandoc, has been working on a project 
> (http://commonmark.org/) to define a standard reference for Markdown*. 
> There are already two reference implementations, one in javascript, the 
> other in C:  https://github.com/jgm/cmark
>
> Regards,
>
> baptiste
>
> * There was some initial controversy with the original author of 
> markdown, but in the long term it's probably one of the more reliable 
> sources to follow.
>
> On 24 May 2015 at 12:00, Duncan Murdoch  wrote:
> On 23/05/2015 9:25 AM, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
>> On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Duncan Murdoch
>> mailto: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.
>
> I wouldn't want R builds to depend on GitHub, so this sounds more
> interesting.  I took a look at that website, and it looks problematic to
> me:  the parser appears to be written in Javascript, and the install
> instructions (using "npm" and "b

Re: [Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha

[Henrik Bengtsson]

On May 24, 2015 2:44 AM, "Rainer M Krug"  wrote:
>
> Gábor Csárdi  writes:
>
> > Dear All,
> >
> > [ I was wondering if this should have gone to the new mailing list.
Maybe. ]
> >
> > As some of you maybe know from my earlier posts, I am building a simple
> > search engine for R packages. Now the search engine has a proper web
site,
> > where you can also browse CRAN packages.
> >
> > http://www.r-pkg.org/
> >
> > As I see the value is in
> > 1. package search (search box on top right)
> > 2. APIs, see http://www.r-pkg.org/services
> >
> > It is in alpha version, meaning that things seem to work, some pages
are a
> > bit slow and there are a lot of glitches to fix.
>
> I had a quick peek, and it looks really nice! I particularly think the
> github integration for diff-ing versions can be very use full!
>
> It might be an idea, to also add R itself to the github repo for
> diff-ing?

You'll find that at:

https://github.com/wch/r-source

Henrik

>
> Thanks a lot,
>
> Rainer
>
> >
> > Please tell me what you think.
> >
> > Best,
> > Gabor
> >
> >   [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
>
> --
> Rainer M. Krug
> email: Rainerkrugsde
> PGP: 0x0F52F982
>
> __
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>

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Re: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 23/05/2015 10:26 PM, Imanuel Costigan wrote:
> 
>> On 24 May 2015, at 12:07 pm, Duncan Murdoch  wrote:
>>
>> On 23/05/2015 9:15 PM, Imanuel Costigan wrote:
>>> While a parsed HTML version of the NEWS.md file would be nice, I would like 
>>> something much simpler: being able to "see” this file in the Help pane in 
>>> RStudio 
>>
>> That isn't really any simpler.  RStudio is just displaying HTML whenever
>> it shows you anything in the Help pane.
> 
> Ok yes, point taken. My post was more in relation to a short-term “fix” of 
> being able to save the NEWS.md file in the package’s top level directory. 
> Users could still be able to read it as a plain text file in their R session 
> (esp. if they don’t have web access) AND be able to see the pretty marked up 
> version on Github if they wished. At the moment, it isn’t possible to make 
> this work without triggering CRAN errors (by storing it in the top-level) or 
> losing the NEWS.md file from top level directory of the package (by saving to 
> inst/) and making it less conventional / accessible on Github. Ideally, one 
> should be able to get the best of both: save this in top-level directory and 
> when necessary, just present it as a text file (at least until such time as 
> Markdown is officially supported). 
> 
>>
>>
>> or being about to run something like show_news(“packagename”). Duncan
>> mentioned issues with the news() function being able to process metadata
>> represented in the Md file. What is the motivation of this structure?
>>
>> I don't understand your question.  What issues did I mention?  Or are
>> you talking about Kurt's post, who first mentioned news()?  And what
>> structure are you talking about?
> 
> Yes I was referring to Kurt’s comments. As I understand it, the short-term 
> “fix” I outlined above wouldn’t work because news() expects a certain 
> structure and can’t extract the elements that it expects from  Markdown files 
> yet. What I am asking is why it isn’t possible / desirable for news() to 
> simply print to the console the contents of `system.file(“NEWS.md”, package = 
> “packagename”)`? For example, `news(package = “devtools”)` returns nothing 
> because it uses “NEWS.md”. 

Short term fixes are generally a bad way to design software.  We should
do this right if we do it at all.  It might require people using Github
to change the way they do things, if that turns out to make more sense
than accommodating them.

Duncan Murdoch

>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
 On 24 May 2015, at 10:51 am, Baptiste Auguie  
 wrote:

 John MacFarlane, the author of Pandoc, has been working on a project 
 (http://commonmark.org/) to define a standard reference for Markdown*. 
 There are already two reference implementations, one in javascript, the 
 other in C:  https://github.com/jgm/cmark

 Regards,

 baptiste

 * There was some initial controversy with the original author of markdown, 
 but in the long term it's probably one of the more reliable sources to 
 follow.

 On 24 May 2015 at 12:00, Duncan Murdoch  wrote:
 On 23/05/2015 9:25 AM, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
> On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Duncan Murdoch
> mailto: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.

 I wouldn't want R builds to depend on GitHub, so this sounds more
 interesting.  I took a look at that website, and it looks problematic to
 me:  the parser appears to be written in Javascript, and the install
 instructions (using "npm" and "bower", whatever those are) depend on
 some unstated prerequisites.  In principle there's no reason not to
 allow R builds to depend on these things, but adding a dependency like
 that implies so much testing that I can't imagine anyone who could do it
 would want to.

 It's likely that a suitable parser could be written in some combination
 of C and R -- Markdown is not a complicated language.

> Pandoc is great for vignettes, but you don't ne

Re: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Baptiste Auguie]

On 24 May 2015 at 14:01, Duncan Murdoch  wrote:

> It sounds as though there are at least two possibilities for parsers
> that could be included in R:  Sundown and commonmark.
>

Sundown is in fact deprecated,
https://github.com/vmg/sundown/commit/37728fb2d7137ff7c37d0a474cb827a8d6d846d8
in favor of commonmark which will likely become the standard tool for
StackExchange, github, Reddit, among others.

The markdown package has been somewhat superseded by rmarkdown, based on
Pandoc. However commonmark would be easier to include (no dependency on
Haskell), much faster, and more memory efficient. The good folks at Rstudio
will probably have considered this option, and may even have started
working on R bindings. Commonmark seems to use an intermediate Abstract
Syntax Tree, which could be also useful for custom processing.

Regards,

baptiste

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Re: [Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Baptiste Auguie]

John MacFarlane, the author of Pandoc, has been working on a project (
http://commonmark.org/) to define a standard reference for Markdown*. There
are already two reference implementations, one in javascript, the other in
C:  https://github.com/jgm/cmark

Regards,

baptiste

* There was some initial controversy with the original author of markdown,
but in the long term it's probably one of the more reliable sources to
follow.

On 24 May 2015 at 12:00, Duncan Murdoch  wrote:

> On 23/05/2015 9:25 AM, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
> > On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Duncan Murdoch
> > mailto: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.
>
> I wouldn't want R builds to depend on GitHub, so this sounds more
> interesting.  I took a look at that website, and it looks problematic to
> me:  the parser appears to be written in Javascript, and the install
> instructions (using "npm" and "bower", whatever those are) depend on
> some unstated prerequisites.  In principle there's no reason not to
> allow R builds to depend on these things, but adding a dependency like
> that implies so much testing that I can't imagine anyone who could do it
> would want to.
>
> It's likely that a suitable parser could be written in some combination
> of C and R -- Markdown is not a complicated language.
>
> > 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.
>
> But we do need something, and it needs to be essentially universally
> available, or small enough to include in the R sources.  I think R
> should eventually support Markdown as an acceptable language for
> documentation (including NEWS.md, and also help files for functions),
> but I think the effort required to do it now is too much.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
> >
> > Gabor
> >
>
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Re: [Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha

[Rainer M Krug]

Gábor Csárdi  writes:

> Dear All,
>
> [ I was wondering if this should have gone to the new mailing list. Maybe. ]
>
> As some of you maybe know from my earlier posts, I am building a simple
> search engine for R packages. Now the search engine has a proper web site,
> where you can also browse CRAN packages.
>
> http://www.r-pkg.org/
>
> As I see the value is in
> 1. package search (search box on top right)
> 2. APIs, see http://www.r-pkg.org/services
>
> It is in alpha version, meaning that things seem to work, some pages are a
> bit slow and there are a lot of glitches to fix.

I had a quick peek, and it looks really nice! I particularly think the
github integration for diff-ing versions can be very use full!

It might be an idea, to also add R itself to the github repo for
diff-ing?

Thanks a lot,

Rainer

>
> Please tell me what you think.
>
> Best,
> Gabor
>
>   [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>

-- 
Rainer M. Krug
email: Rainerkrugsde
PGP: 0x0F52F982


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