Martin Maechler wrote:
"SF" == Seth Falcon <s...@userprimary.net>
on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:49:12 -0800 writes:
SF> On 11/11/09 2:36 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> On 10/11/2009 11:16 PM, Tony Plate wrote:
>>> PS, I should have said that I'm reading the docs for unlink in
>>> R-2.10.0 on a Linux system. The docs that appear in a Windows
>>> installation of R are different (the Windows docs do not mention that
>>> not all systems support recursive=TRUE).
>>>
>>> Here's a plea for docs to be uniform across all systems! Trying to
>>> write R code that works on all systems is much harder when the docs
>>> are different across systems, and you might only see system specific
>>> notes on a different system than the one you're working on.
>>
>> That's a good point, but in favour of the current practice, it is very
>> irritating when searches take you to functions that don't work on your
>> system.
>>
>> One thing that might be possible is to render all versions of the help
>> on all systems, but with some sort of indicator (e.g. a colour change)
>> to indicate things that don't apply on your system, or only apply on
>> your system. I think the hardest part of doing this would be designing
>> the output; actually implementing it would not be so bad.
SF> I would be strongly in favor of a change that provided documentation for
SF> all systems on all systems.
SF> Since platform specific behavior for R functions is the exception rather
SF> than the norm, I would imagine that simply displaying doc sections by
SF> platform would be sufficient.
SF> I think the benefit of being able to see what might not work on another
SF> platform far out weighs the inconvenience of finding doc during a search
SF> for something that only works on another platform -- hey, that still
SF> might be useful as it would tell you what platform you should use ;-)
I strongly agree.
As someone said, this only applies to relatively few help pages,
and I'm not sure if it's worth (at the moment) of first
designing a rendering scheme to emphasize your current platform.
Maybe even to the contrary, I'd want the PDF version of the
help page to (almost (*)) entirely platform independent.
It depends how thing *are* platform dependent.
If one function argument only applies to Windows, then the
corresponding paragraph could simply start,
"On Windows, .....".
In other situations, using something similar to what Henrik
proposed, a \section{..} on platform specific parts would
suffice.
If that's the intention, there's nothing to stop you from editing the
existing pages. A quick grep suggests that there are about 100 pages
with #ifdef in the base and recommended packages; there are also a few
dozen pages which are completely platform-specific (mostly related to
Windows API or GUI topics). I suspect the Linux users are going to be
the biggest complainers if the Windows-only material starts showing up
on their systems. They don't like to be told they should be using
Windows rather than Linux.
Duncan Murdoch
I also find it very important that I read on "my" (OS) help page,
about less or more functionality on another platform, and I'd
rather want the full details of that platform than just
a note that something is platform dependent.
Of course, there's the situation of missing / extra capabilities()
but I think these are well documented where applicable, and they
*do* follow the idea that you should also learn about things
that are currently not available to you.
Martin
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
