On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Duncan Murdoch wrote: [...]
> My proposal (modified following the suggestions I've heard so far) is as > follows: > > - to check that a couple of help topic aliases exist (<pkg>.package > and <pkg>) > - to recommend that <pkg>.package contain general information about > the package, and that <pkg> be an alias for it, if it isn't used for > some other purpose. > - to write promptPackage() to help create an initial version of > <pkg>.package.Rd. It can get some information from the DESCRIPTION > file; perhaps it could go looking for a vignette, or the INDEX, or > - to modify the other help system tools to make use of this (e.g. the > package:<pkg> heading on a page would become a link to the <pkg>.package > alias, etc.) > as a package author who already provides help pages for general package descriptions (`?multcomp' and `?coin' work and, if I remember correctly, Martin suggested to include the advertisement this way) I must admit that I never say `?foo' when I'm interested in a global overview about a new package `foo'. Instead, `library(help = foo)' gives what I want to see, namely the title and description of a package and all documented topics. One may argue that asking `library' for help is not the most obvious thing to do. But people able to recall that fitting an ANOVA model requires `aov' and comparing two models needs `anova' should be able to have `library' in mind for general package information. So, for me having infrastructure for _automatically_ generated overviews is very nice, but _forcing_ package authors to provide additional meta-information would be less welcome. Best, Torsten ______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
