dschaykib / newsmd

A package to create and update the NEWS.md file

newsmd - 0.5.1

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---

A package to create and update the NEWS.md file.

Installation

install.packages("newsmd")

# for dev version use
devtools::install_github("Dschaykib/newsmd", ref = "dev")
library(newsmd)

Usage of newsmd

The main part of the package is the news object, which is an R6 class object and contains the text for the NEWS.md file. You can add versions, subtitles and bullet points to it via the objects' methods. If you want to create the NEWS.md file from your git commits, then have a look at these packages: fledge or autonewsmd.

Initialise a new object

To initialise a new object you can use two different ways:

my_news <- news$new()
my_news <- newsmd()

The default text contains markdown code and looks like this:

## version 0.0.0.9000

---

### NEWS.md setup

- added NEWS.md creation with newsmd

From version 0.4.0, you can also start with an existing NEWS.md file. In this case, the file is checked for the last version and adds a new dev version to it.

Adding a the next version

With add_version you can update the version number.

my_news$add_version("0.0.1")

Adding a new subtitle

With add_subtitle you can add a new subtitle, where the following bullet points will be under.

my_news$add_subtitle("Bugfixes")

Adding more bullets

With add_bullet you can add more bullet points to the latest version and latest subtitle.

my_news$add_bullet(c("this is point 1", "this is point 2"))

Getting the whole text

After these few changes, let's see how the file looks. The get_text method will return each single line of the file. Alternatively you can just use print(my_news).

my_news$get_text()

 [1] "## version 0.0.1"        
 [2] ""                        
 [3] "---"                     
 [4] ""                        
 [5] ""                        
 [6] "### Bugfixes"            
 [7] ""                        
 [8] "- this is point 1"       
 [9] "- this is point 2"       
[10] ""                        
[11] ""                        
[12] "## version 0.0.0.9000"   
[13] ""                        
[14] "---"                     
[15] ""                        
[16] "### NEWS.md setup"       
[17] ""                        
[18] "- added NEWS.md creation with newsmd"
[19] "" 

Writing the NEWS.md file

At last, with write you can save all your changes into the NEWS.md file.

my_news$write()

Combination with the desc package

The goal of this package was to update the NEWS.md file in addition to the DESCRIPTION file. To optimize the workflow I suggest the desc package. For example instead of manually defining the version number, you can use desc_bump_version() and get_version() of the desc package:

my_desc$bump_version("patch")
my_news$add_version(my_desc$get_version())

my_news$add_bullet("added automated creation for DESCRIPTION and NEWS.md")

The full example script I used for this package's NEWS file, can be found here.

newsmd's Issues

adding version finding for given NEWS.md file

add a check for the latest version of of given NEWS.md file and use it for the creation.

adjust the print method so that only the latest version is shown

To make the print output a little more usable, try to adjust it, so that only the latest version is shown.

fledge

Just in case you might ignore: https://github.com/krlmlr/fledge