On Oct 6, 2008, at 11:18 , Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 10/6/2008 11:00 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Oct 6, 2008, at 8:47 , Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 06/10/2008 8:06 AM, Thomas Petzoldt wrote:
Duncan Murdoch wrote:
Thomas Petzoldt wrote:
Dear R developers,
if one uses package.skeleton() to create a new package, then a
file anRpackage.Rd with the following entries is prepared:
\name{anRpackage-package}
\alias{anRpackage-package}
\alias{anRpackage}
\docType{package}
Packages created this way have a definite entry or overview
page, so:
?anRpackage
gives new users of a certain package a pointer where to start
reading.
This is similar for packages which have the same name as their
main workhorse function, e.g. zoo or nlme, but there are many
packages which don't have an \alias{anRpackage}.
"Writing R Extensions", sec. 2.1.4 says:
"Packages may have an overview man page with an \alias pkgname-
package, e.g. `utils-package' for the utils package, when
package? pkgname will open that help page. If a topic named
pkgname does not exist in another Rd file, it is helpful to
use this as an additional \alias."
My question: what speaks against making this sentence more
pronounced and why not NOTE-ing a missing package alias in the
package check?
Not everybody likes the idea of the overview man page, so when
I wrote that I left it weak. Some of the disadvantages:
You speak about the disadvantages but there are, of course,
obvious advantages. Almost all scientific papers start with an
abstract, why not requesting one for software packages, at least
for new ones?
We already require one in the DESCRIPTION file for all packages,
which you can see with
library(help=packagename)
Yes, but this is way too long to write - could we add a fall-back
so that if ?foo alias doesn't exist but package foo does then ?foo
is equivalent to help(package="foo")? At least for the way I use
help it would help a lot...
?foo and help("foo") return an object with a class whose print
method displays the help. So doing this would require a new class
with a different print method. It seems cleaner to me to ask people
to provide the ?foo topic within the existing system, as we do now,
... which doesn't seem to work - that's why we have the discussion ;).
or to produce the topic automatically at install time, so it works
within the existing system.
... which if ok with me - that would fit the bill ...
Thanks,
Simon
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