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 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?
> On 24 May 2015, at 10:51 am, Baptiste Auguie <[email protected]> > 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 <[email protected]> wrote: > On 23/05/2015 9:25 AM, Gábor Csárdi wrote: > > On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Duncan Murdoch > > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> 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 > > > > ______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
