NEWS & Relases

[sckott]

I'd suggest that it be mandatory that pkg authors use a NEWS or NEWS.md file, AND that on each CRAN release relavant news bits are put into a tagged release on the Releases tab for their repo.

sound good?

@ropensci/leadership

[cboettig]

👍

[karthik]

I also like Dean's idea of including date on the each release. So that way one can quickly know when the last update was.

[sckott]

sounds good

[karthik]

Maybe a constructive way forward is that we include a sample NEWS.md here and point out things that people should strive to include. Key information, how to succinctly describe changes, what level to summarize, etc.

[sckott]

sounds good.

[sckott]

^^ thoughts

[karthik]

I like it. One other idea, is to do an annotated version (using photoshop) for the README. I can do it, but not till later in the week. Here is an example from an upcoming blog post of mine:

We'd show people that things like (#18) mean issue #18 in their repo. etc.

[daattali]

I'm glad to know someone thought my idea to include the data in news was good -- on Twitter I received a lot of pushback on that :)

What are your thoughts on only suggesting to use NEWS.md and not NEWS? From what I can tell, NEWS.md seems to be the convention, it's accepted by CRAN, it's what Hadley recommends in his book, and it just seems to fit better with the general idea that all human-readable meta-files are markdown

[maelle]

Closing this before archiving the repo since development of guidelines moved to https://github.com/ropensci/dev_guide (and after gathering the ideas that haven't implemented yet 👼 )