On 23 December 2016 16:36, Laurent Gatto wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I'm following up re my online references suggestion with my recent
> experience with Hadley's pkgdown package
>
> https://github.com/hadley/pkgdown
>
> It doesn't address the cross-package issue (which is a difficult one
> anyway), but does pretty much everything else (with some caveats though,
> see below).
>
> Here are 2 examples
>
> - MSnbase: http://lgatto.github.io/MSnbase/
> - hpar: http://lgatto.github.io/hpar/
>
> It uses the REAMDE file as index page, creates html documents for all Rd
> files in man, an article tab for vignettes (but see below) and a News
> tab (but see below)
>
> The biggest caveats is that only Rmd vignettes are taken into account;
> Rnw are completely ignored (they don't show up at all in the Articles
> tab). This is not going to be tackled by the developer [1].
>
> [1] https://github.com/hadley/pkgdown/issues/220
>
> I had a quick look at the code and patching pkgdown (and probably
> rmarkdown) to build Rnw/pdf vignettes would take too much time I could
> devote at the moment. I would be satisfied if the Rnw were not build but
> at least there were links in the Articles tab pointing to the vignettes
> Bioconductor landing pages. On the other hand, I am migrating to
> BiocStyle's html_document2 with the nice floating table of contents...
>
> Regarding the News tab, only NEWS.md (markdown format) are considered;
> NEWS in Rd are ignored too.
And, NEWS.md does not work (yet?) with the news() function.
As a workaround to this, a regular expression such as the following
(this is the make recipe from [1])
NEWS: #' create plain text NEWS from NEWS.md if available
test -f ${PKGDIR}/NEWS.md && sed 's/^# .*$$\|^## //g'
${PKGDIR}/NEWS.md > ${PKGDIR}/NEWS
can convert the markdown version to a regular text file. This allows to
use the news() function and benefit from a nice only md version.
To keep things tidy, one can then add the NEWS.md in .Rbuildignore and
NEWS to .gitignore, to keep only the relevant file in the package
bundle/repo.
Laurent
[1] https://github.com/computationalproteomicsunit/maker
> Hope this helps.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Laurent
>
> On 16 March 2016 23:33, Andrzej Oleś wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I had a discussion earlier today with Martin and Dan on providing
>> online man pages for Bioconductor packages. As we dived into
>> implementation details, it turned out that this idea is a little bit
>> more complex and resource-intensive than originally anticipated.
>>
>> The main problem in generating man pages in a repository-wide fashion
>> seems to be the cross-linking of packages. Briefly, in order to
>> generate the links, apparently one needs to generate the html pages in
>> an R installation which is aware of the other packages. For example,
>> the Rd macro \linkS4class{ClassName} takes as argument only the class
>> name, and the corresponding package containing the class definition is
>> "automagically" resolved by R. I'm not sure how this could be done
>> manually, on a per-package basis. So by the end of the day, in order to
>> generate static man pages, we would need to maintain a complete BioC
>> repo installation, possibly on a system with the --enable-prebuilt-html
>> configure option. Unfortunately, it seems unfeasible to exploit the
>> build servers for this, as this would significantly increase the
>> computational burden. This is because currently only around 2/5 of all
>> software and data packages are actually being installed by the build
>> system. The rest which does not have any reverse dependencies is
>> skipped. Installing the remaining 3/5 of packages on a regular basis,
>> not to mention the heavy annotation packages, is a little bit of an
>> overkill. So piggy-backing on the existing infrastructure doesn't seem
>> realistic.
>>
>> On top of this, even if we would have access to a machine with a
>> complete, up-to-date BioC installation (maybe by just updating the
>> packages after the repo gets rebuild rather than re-installing them
>> each time from scratch), it remains an open question how "external"
>> links to, let's say, CRAN packages, or even base R packages, should be
>> handled.
>>
>> A lightweight and easy to implement alternative for those willing to
>> share self-hosted documentation of their packages, could be to provide
>> in the package DESCRIPTION file a "Documentation" field containing a
>> link to external resource, which would then appear on the package
>> landing page next to the vignettes and pdf manual. The obvious
>> downsides of this solution are: 1. no package cross-links, and 2. the
>> burden of keeping the documentation in sync with the package version on
>> BioC would be in maintainer's hands...
>>
>> I will try to contact the authors of rdocumentation.org - maybe they
>> have some useful comments or even code which they would be willing to
>> share. In any case, it would be good to know what their experience is
>> and why did they stop maintaining their service. Maybe the BioC
>> community could jump in and help them to resolve the bottlenecks and
>> keep the website up to date.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andrzej
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 8, 2016 at 4:36 PM, Andrzej Oleś <andrzej.o...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Martin,
>>
>> thank you for your suggestions - I would be happy to contribute to
>> this! I could help with developing the scripts for generating man
>> pages, and integrating them with the website layout.
>>
>> As for rendering the man pages, I suggest that we try a similar
>> approach to the one used by knitr::knit_rd() rather than plain
>> tools::Rd2HTML(). It has the advantage that the examples are
>> actually run, and the results, e.g. plots, are included in the
>> output documents. I hope you can appreciate the added value by
>> comparing the following man page rendered using tools::Rd2HTML()
>> and knitr::knit_rd(), respectively.
>> http://www.huber.embl.de/users/aoles/man/Image.html
>> http://www.huber.embl.de/users/aoles/man/Image-knitr.html
>> Regarding the additional dependencies: we kind of already rely on
>> knitr when compiling vignettes, so this this shouldn't add much to
>> the maintenance burden.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andrzej
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 2:20 PM, Morgan, Martin <
>> martin.mor...@roswellpark.org> wrote:
>>
>> One thing about accessing the html versions locally (e.g., via
>> ? with options(help_type="html")] or help.start() or Rstudio)
>> is that you get the version relevant to your R / Bioconductor,
>> rather than whatever is at the top of google; I guess the same
>> applies to the pdf versions, and the reason that there isn't
>> more current confusion is because the online pdf versions are
>> not as useful as the off-line help system.
>>
>> I think Laurent was interested in an integration of help pages
>> across packages (which is the appeal of rdocumentation.org?),
>> not just rendering the help pages in html rather than pdf? An
>> integration of help pages would definitely be a big job with
>> substantial development and maintenance; we will not be
>> undertaking this ourselves.
>>
>> For the more limited case of adding a (directory of) html files
>> for the the manual, it's not impossible that we could find the
>> resources to do this in the next 6 months.
>>
>> One intermediate and helpful step for those willing to help
>> would be to develop the code to process help pages into a style
>> consistent with the bioconductor web site. One place where this
>> could be implemented would be the BiocStyle package (https://
>> github.com/Bioconductor-mirror/BiocStyle but hmm, seems like
>> there's a slightly out of sync version at https://github.com/
>> Bioconductor/BiocStyle that would be more convenient...).
>> Perhaps this really means only developing a css style sheet and
>> R's tools::Rd2HTML() (I'm very reluctant to introduce
>> dependencies into the build system, and am very conservative
>> about inclusion of fancy features in the html -- these become
>> significant maintenance burdens moving forward).
>>
>> The web site is generated by https://github.com/Bioconductor/
>> bioconductor.org, with the style sheet at https://github.com/
>> Bioconductor/bioconductor.org/blob/master/assets/style/
>> bioconductor.css. The package landing pages are templated using
>> layouts/_bioc_views_package_detail.html. The idea would be to
>> end up with layouts/_bioc_man_index.html and
>> _bioc_man_body.html that wrapped output from BiocStyle in the
>> overall bioc page.
>>
>> The implementation suggestions above are just a sketch and
>> could be quite misguided. If there's interest then probably we
>> should set up a hangout to discuss in a little more detail.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>> ________________________________________
>> From: Bioc-devel <bioc-devel-boun...@r-project.org> on behalf
>> of Hartley, Stephen (NIH/NHGRI) [F] <stephen.hart...@nih.gov>
>> Sent: Wednesday, March 2, 2016 11:46 AM
>> To: Laurent Gatto; bioc-devel
>> Subject: Re: [Bioc-devel] Package reference manuals in html
>>
>> I'd like to second this. Currently Bioconductor hosts the pdf
>> reference manuals, but those are often sub-ideal. The page
>> breaks make it harder to read, the fixed width basically makes
>> it either too small or too big depending on your display, you
>> can't navigate cross-package links, and in general using
>> paper-formatted software documentation is just poor form.
>>
>> Yihui, the creator of knitr, has a blog post where he shows how
>> to do this. There are a lot of ways to do this, and it's
>> generally pretty straightforward.
>> http://yihui.name/en/2012/10/build-static-html-help/
>>
>> You can also use a function in knitr, knit_rd(), which builds
>> the examples as well and inserts the output right onto the
>> page. That's what I used to make the docs for QoRTs (http://
>> hartleys.github.io/QoRTs/Rhtml/index.html) and JunctionSeq (
>> http://hartleys.github.io/JunctionSeq/Rhtml/index.html).
>>
>> Or you can use the staticdocs package, which does the same
>> basic thing but prettier (see ggplot2's docs: http://
>> docs.ggplot2.org/current/)
>>
>> The nuclear option, of course, is to do what CRAN does and
>> rebuild R on (one of) the servers using the
>> --enable-prebuilt-html configure option. That might affect
>> other things, though, and might not be ideal.
>>
>> Does any of this seem like a viable option for Bioconductor? I
>> think it could be an incredibly valuable resource for the
>> community. Are there any technical issues that haven't been
>> considered in the above?
>>
>> Regards,
>> Steve Hartley
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Laurent Gatto [mailto:lg...@cam.ac.uk]
>> Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2016 6:42 AM
>> To: bioc-devel
>> Subject: [Bioc-devel] Package reference manuals in html
>>
>>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I find the http://www.rdocumentation.org/ site very useful to
>> refer to nicely formatted online man pages individually.
>> Unfortunately, this resource is terribly outdated and not
>> maintained anymore.
>>
>> I was wondering if Bioconductor had any interest in serving an
>> html version of individual reference manuals in addition to the
>> pdf that are already available on the package landing pages.
>>
>> Is there anything I or any other members of the community could
>> help with to get this up and running?
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Laurent
>>
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--
Laurent Gatto | @lgatt0
http://cpu.sysbiol.cam.ac.uk/
http://lgatto.github.io/
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