Romain Francois suggests that a central bibliographic database (possibly in bibtex format) might be useful for reference inclusion in R package man pages. This has been discussed by a small group, with one proposal presented for a package-specific bibtex database placed in a dedicated package subdirectory. Man page references would then cite the sources enumerated in the database using their bibtex tags. This approach could encourage better annotation and should confer greater accuracy on package:literature referencing.
This does not rule out a central archive that might include all the references cited in base man pages. We are doing some work on harvesting the bibliographic citations in man pages in an R distribution, and converting them to a regular format. The \references section is free form, so the conversion is not trivial, but progress has been made. The infrastructure required to use this approach to propagate (e.g., bibtex-formatted) bibliographic data into the man pages that cite the sources is not yet available, but we hope to have some prototypes in the next month. [apologies if i mess up the threading on this topic; i did not receive the original e-mail to r-devel] Vince Carey [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
