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cran-task-views / Tracking

CRAN Task View: Processing and Analysis of Tracking Data
https://CRAN.R-project.org/view=Tracking
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General task view improvements #1

Closed zeileis closed 2 years ago

zeileis commented 2 years ago

Format: We have converted the old XML-based task views file now to the new Markdown-based format. Please check the resulting .md file whether everything is in order or some corrections/improvements are needed. See the corresponding documentation for more details.

Update: This would also be a good time to check the entire task whether it is up to date and correct. A write-up of the general goals and content guidelines is now summarized in the workflow for proposing new task views (which was not yet available when you authored your task view). Improving your task view to conform more closely with these goals and guidelines, if necessary, would be highly appreciated.

Co-maintainers: So far only the principal maintainer was added as the admin for this new repository. It would probably be easiest if you add the other co-maintainers as maintainers for the new repository as well.

rociojoo commented 2 years ago

Thanks, Achim. I added Mathieu Basille as a maintainers and I am waiting for confirmation from the others to see if they want to keep maintaining it. I am working on the .md internally and will update it during January.

zeileis commented 2 years ago

Sounds good, thanks for the follow-up!

rociojoo commented 2 years ago

Achim @zeileis , the repo will become public once it's ready, right? Otherwise I don't see how people will be able to submit issues.

zeileis commented 2 years ago

Yes, exactly. The idea is that the maintainers have some time in January for responding to issues (like this one) that I posted in all of the task views. And then we will make them public and update the web pages on CRAN. I'll also mention this in the corresponding ctv issue.

rociojoo commented 2 years ago

That's great, Achim, thanks. Then, we will be moving everything from our current repo to this one between next week and the week after that.

rociojoo commented 2 years ago

The repo is now up to date. We will search for more maintainers after it becomes public. Mathieu @basille please double check if there's anything you'd like to add/modify.

basille commented 2 years ago

That's great, thanks @rociojoo!

Let me ask this question here, hopefully @zeileis can answer this one: Could we have a NEWS section in the YAML headers of the CTV? Currently, the NEWS.md file does not appear anywhere in Tracking.md, and that's really missing. At the very least, we need to link to the NEWS file somewhere visible in Tracking.md, but the YAML seems like the best place for it.

Ideally, links to the GitHub repo and directly for issues could be in the YAML headers too. What do you think @zeileis?

zeileis commented 2 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion of a NEWS file but I'm not convinced that this fits the workflow for many task views. In many task views we have many small modifications that are done more or less continuously. For tracking these modifications the history of the repository is probably most useful. You, on the other hand, are aiming for larger modifications and official "releases". I would suggest that we wait and see how this works out when we officially announce the new task views initiative. I hope that this leads to more frequent incremental changes in many task views.

rociojoo commented 2 years ago

I will close this issue now. I think that we can talk about other specific things in new issues.

basille commented 2 years ago

Thanks @zeileis for your detailed answer. I totally get it that all CTVs do not follow the same approach, and I respect that. I am not advocating that everybody follows our approach, which suits our needs, but certainly not all. Nevertheless, I think it would be great to have an optional NEWS section. That would work just like for CRAN packages: not all packages have a README or a NEWS, but it can be set and used in the CRAN page. In the case of CTV, there could be exactly the same approach: if NEWS is provided in the YAML headers, then the link is used in the main sections on top of the CTV page. As a matter of fact, README would be another good candidate.

zeileis commented 2 years ago

There are standardized READMEs in all GitHub repositories now (and should not be modified by the maintainers). And the GitHub repositories will be linked from CRAN for all task views as well. So I don't think we need an additional field here.

As for the NEWS, I appreciate the argument about CRAN packages. But these have a very different development model from task views so I'm not sure whether it applies here. As I said above, I hope that by promoting the relaunched CRAN Task View Initiative we will move to relatively frequent and small updates of all task views. And if that works out, a NEWS file describing major changes is probably not the best fit. But let's see where we go from here.

basille commented 2 years ago

Copy that, and I understand your logic.

Let me put it here for the record though: We (maintainers of the Tracking CTV) would love to see such an option proposed to the CTVs, of course non mandatory.