On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>
> And one more comment. The DESCRIPTION file does not record the
> location or existence of the various subdirectories such as R, man,
> exec, etc. If NEWS is to be recorded as a meta data line item in
> DESCRIPTION then surely all of these should be too so its symmetric
> and they are all on an equal footing (or else none of them
> should be, which in fact I think is preferable).
>
I don't see any advantage in symmetry. The locations of these
subdirectories are fixed and I can't see why someone trying to decide
whether to install an upgrade needs to know if it has an exec
subdirectory before they download the package.
I also don't see why THANKS and WISHLIST should need to be visible before
you download the package. CRAN does display a URL if one is given, and if
these are important they could be at that URL.
The changelog, on the other hand, is one piece of information that is
really valuable in deciding whether or not to update a package, so it
would be worth having it visible on CRAN. Since other coding standards
suggest different things for the name and location of this file, a path in
DESCRIPTION seems a minimal change.
-thomas
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