Closed olivroy closed 6 months ago
gavinsimpson
commented
6 months ago One thing I am slightly worried about is having documentation for the in-development version of vegan. That's partly why I haven't gone further down this route after getting the basic build up an running.
jarioksa
commented
6 months ago Personally I'm absolutely non-interested on pkgdown. It was suggested long time ago, and some of my young co-developers implemented pkgdown. When I look at the pkgdown page, I see no value added (and – fortunately – no VAT paid even if it is a private for-profit organization https://posit.co). In contrast, R-Universe provides a real service with binary installs of vegan and a better front page than pkgdown (for instance with vignettes). Would I add a new URL to DESCRIPTION (which already has an URL), I'd prefer R-Universe that has the same information as the commercial pkgdown plus adds advantage of providing binary builds (and vignettes). However, I have no keen interest on the issue and I trust Gavin Simpson. Some minor issues follow: R manual for packages says that that the preferred location of NEWS is inst/NEWS. The manual allows NEWS in the main directory, but inst/NEWS takes preference. R manual also says that only Rd format is handled. I was aware of this when I switched from preferred format to .md just because utils::news still works except that it cannot show changes in a single version. However, I thought that the thing that people want to see and need to see are the latest changes – who wants to see what happened in vegan 2.4-3? (It was possible while I had Rd formatted NEWS). What your PR suggests is to give back that choice that I had before switching from Rd to md format. Then I thought that this loss was meaningless and now I think that the same gain would be useless. Anyway, I'm just non-interested and I leave the issue for the judgment of younger developers. I see that pkgdown allows more developed web pages, but currently we do not have them. The people who are going to develop pkgdown pages can decice what to do (and do it).
jarioksa
commented
6 months ago @gavinsimpson I have no problem with documenting in-development version of vegan. I do think that it could be useful as it makes people aware of emerging features, and they may be better tested and commented before release. When a feature gets to NEWS, it usually regarded as ready for inspection.
jarioksa
commented
6 months ago I have no problems with this PR. I am not keenly interested in it either, but I just don't care. I didn't have any particular reason for using those header levels except that in some renditions toplevel (#) and second level (##) looked disproportionally big. That of course depends on the rendition. It seems that CRAN does more nicely with # and ## levels than my old choice. Neither do I object moving NEWS to the "toplevel". My original choice of inst/ was based on the R extension manual, but that allows "toplevel" (even though "toplevel" will be written over if there are inst/NEWS). Neither do I have much against adding that a new URL as a homepage even if I really do think that this page is pretty useless and annoyingly juvenile (mickeysofty). There is a lot of space in DESCRIPTION to use. However, I have updated inst/NEWS.md (and DESCRIPTION as well) so much that currently this PR cannot be merged directly. Two alternatives: either you update your PR or I just use good old sed (ask your father) to change the heading levels and we can see other changes separately.
olivroy
commented
6 months ago I have fixed the merge conflicts
The goal of having the website is enhanced discoverability and linking https://blog.r-hub.io/2019/12/10/urls/
Moving NEWS.md to top level and changing version heading to first level should get the changelog automatically on the website.
https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/reference/build_news.html