News file formatting

[lshep]

News file formatting check doesn't seem to always pick up on poorly-formatted news file.

[HenrikBengtsson]

If useful, here's a validation of traditional NEWS files that I discovered some years ago. If it passes without "bad" entries, then R will render the content, e.g. news(package = "future"). If there's a single "bad" entry, then the NEWS is displayed as-is.

news_check <- function(pathname = "NEWS", verbose = FALSE) {
  db <- tools:::.news_reader_default(pathname)
  bad <- which(attr(db, "bad"))
  if (length(bad) == 0L) {
    if (verbose) message(sprintf("All %s NEWS entries OK", nrow(db)))
    return(invisible())
  }
  db[bad,]
}

[lshep]

We already have that implemented or tried to but it still doesn't seem to pick it up all the time

BiocCheck/R/checks.R

Line 1287 in 4687a90

suppressWarnings({

[lcolladotor]

There's also NEWS.md files (I use them now in most of my packages), just something to keep in mind for these checks.

As for the format, maybe as part of this, there could be a companion issue at https://github.com/Bioconductor/bioconductor.org on explaining a bit more or showing more examples of the valid format(s).

[HenrikBengtsson]

Agree NEWS.md could/should be validated too. But, just an FYI, support for NEWS.md is still limited in R, e.g. it does not produce a 'Package NEWS' entry the HTML package page (help.start()). It also causes news() to produce an error if you don't have {commonmark} and {xml2} installed;

> news(package="purrr")
Error in loadNamespace(name) : there is no package called 'commonmark'

[lshep]

If you look at the code chunk I referenced it takes into account md files.

[lshep]

Besides move to BiocCheckGitClone -- more complicated -- a poorly formatted NEWS file won't actually fail or cause an ERROR when being run -- need to figure out how to check syntax of output