>>>>> A J Rossini writes: > On 6/8/05, Torsten Hothorn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> 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.
> I'm in the Robert/Brian school of thought -- this can be solved with > better DESCRIPTIONS, or by explicitly writing such a file (which one > can already do), or through better advertisement / incorporation of > the vignette tools. Yep. > Requiring anything additional is a PITA. Sure, it doesn't look like > much time, but it is. "much" is in the eye of the beholder. > Perhaps one thing to do is to map > ?<pkgname>.package > to > library(help=pkgname) > as was previously suggested, and let authors put information in the > DESCRIPTION, perhaps with a lead towards the right help file to use to > get more. If we want to do something along these lines, then we could map package ? pkgname => help(package = "pkgname") I don't think we can do something which possibly masks topics for objects of class package :-) -k ______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
