On 10/6/2008 9:55 AM, hadley wickham wrote:
It may not be much work for you, but I find any additional
requirements to the package format to be a real pain. I have ~10
packages on CRAN and having to go through and add this extra
information all at once is a big hassle. R releases tend to happen in
the middle of the US academic semester when I have a lot of other
things on my plate.
O.K., but the discussion with Duncan shows:
- the required information is already available (in DESCRIPTION),
- one can think about ways to generate the page automatically for existing
packages,
- the intro can be short and should link to other pages or PDFs,
- one should avoid doubling and inconsistency.
I'm obviously not going to object if it's done automatically, and I
already strive to avoid doubling and inconsistency by producing most
my documentation algorithmically. I think you are being cavalier by
not caring about the extra work you want package authors to do.
Additionally, I find that rdoc is the wrong format for lengthy
explanation and exposition - a pdf is much better - and I think that
the packages already have a abstract: the description field in
DESCRIPTION.
o.k., but abstract may be (technically) in the wrong format and does not
point to the other relevant parts of the package documentation.
Then I don't think you should call what you want an abstract.
The main problem with vignettes at the moment is that
they must be sweave, a format which I don't really like. I wish I
could supply my own pdf + R code file produced using whatever tools I
choose.
I like Sweave, and it is also possible to include your own PDFs and R files
and then to reference them in anRpackage.Rd.
Yes, but they're not vignettes - which means they're not listed under
vignette() and it's yet another place for people to look for
documentation.
Vignettes have R code in them and a way to extract it, so it's
misleading to call something that's just a .pdf file a vignette. But I
imagine there could be other ways to mix R code with documentation
besides the existing Sweave formats. The most obvious way to add
another one is to write another Sweave driver. I think it would require
changes to the base of R to allow for Sweave drivers in packages,
working with files that don't have extensions (R|r|S|s)(nw|tex), but in
principle I don't see any real objection to adding that.
Duncan Murdoch
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
