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`MAINTENANCE.md` is getting rendered

Open jennybc opened this issue 4 weeks ago • 4 comments

I went to cpp11's pkgdown site and searched for "clangd":

Image

And, lo, the MAINTENANCE.md file is getting included in the website with the title NA:

https://cpp11.r-lib.org/MAINTENANCE.html

This actually lead me to some useful information, so that was cool! But this feels like an accident to me 🤷‍♀️ I assume if we were doing this on purpose, there would be a better title and some planned way to navigate to this file.

This is happening for lots of our packages. It makes me wonder if other top-level .md files are getting somewhat accidentally rendered by pkgdown.

  • glue: https://glue.tidyverse.org/MAINTENANCE.html
  • readr: https://readr.tidyverse.org/MAINTENANCE.html
  • vroom: https://vroom.tidyverse.org/MAINTENANCE.html
  • ditto for devtools, remotes, fs, bench, withr, ...

jennybc avatar Nov 26 '25 00:11 jennybc

IMHO it's connected to https://github.com/r-lib/pkgdown/issues/2959 where I noticed that AGENTS.md is also rendered.

pawelru avatar Nov 26 '25 09:11 pawelru

Yeah via another channel @hadley says "Yeah pkgdown just renders all the top level markdown files because it’s easier than trying to figure out exactly which ones might be useful".

@thomasp85 suggests a possible tweak to the "just let it happen" situation: "Maybe, in the absence of a title just use the filename with _ substituted to space and title cased. At least in that way it doesn’t feel so accidental"

jennybc avatar Nov 26 '25 15:11 jennybc

I think it's also worth thinking about the weirdness of (1) no way to navigate to such files but also (2) still covering them via search. It feels like some sort of hidden storage room.

jennybc avatar Nov 26 '25 17:11 jennybc

@jennybc that weirdness also comes up with internal functions, so I'm not too worried about it.

hadley avatar Nov 28 '25 08:11 hadley