build_news needs specially formatted NEWS.md

[rmflight]

In pkgdown 1.6.1, build_news rendered fine with any kind of heading. As in I could have NEWS.md containing:

# v 0.0.2

* more bugs!

# v 0.0.1

* bugs fixed

However, as of v 2.0.1, that seems to have changed. The above contents in NEWS.md will render an empty page. Instead, it has to be formatted like this in NEWS.md:

# packageName 0.0.2

* more bugs!

# packageName 0.0.1

* bugs fixed

I'm not sure how many other people were using a simpler format of NEWS.md as I was, but it would be nice if the docs or vignette for bulid_news had more information on the required formatting.

[maelle]

What also doesn't work is having all h2. Maybe it should work.

[maelle]

#1967

[Al-Murphy]

Hey! I ran into what I think is the same issue with a GHA check on my Bioconductor R package: https://github.com/neurogenomics/MungeSumstats/runs/4522582120?check_suite_focus=true

Is a fix likely to be released soon or is there a work around for time being? I'm constricted since Bioconductor enforces standards on the NEWS file

[kevinushey]

I ran into this too with reticulate: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rstudio/reticulate/main/NEWS.md

> pkgdown::build_news()
-- Building news ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Error: Invalid NEWS.md: bad nesting of titles

Presumedly because these are H2 rather than H1 headers.

[privefl]

I'm having a similar issue, where some headers do not render.

E.g. https://github.com/privefl/bigsnpr/blob/e72fa27b7bb4486b542505c46454ffcd21e5fa18/NEWS.md?plain=1#L71-L73 in https://github.com/privefl/bigsnpr/blob/e72fa27b7bb4486b542505c46454ffcd21e5fa18/docs/news/index.html#L155-L160.

Problem is still there after updating to latest GitHub version of {pkgdown}.

[maelle]

@privefl that header is for "bigsparser" but the package is "bigsnpr" hence its not being recognized.

Side note: in general it's better to open a new issue.

[privefl]

Yes, but I also want to show some important new releases from another package, of which my package is very dependent on.

This was working with v1.6.1.

[privefl]

Should I expect this not to be fixed? (i.e. working as with v1.6.1)

[hadley]

@privefl you seem to expect a special case that was only ever supported by accident and we don’t plan to support going forward.