Torsten Hothorn 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'.
I do occasionally, but usually it's a waste of time. This proposal is
intended to address that.
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.
As I pointed out, this is okay for people who know R already, but not so
good for beginners. The answer to the question "how do I get help on
foo?" is too complex.
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.
What do you think of Henrik's suggestion to generate a help topic giving
information equivalent to library(help=<pkg>)? I think this would
happen at install time (not build time as he said; no need to put this
in the source tarballs). If the <pkg>.package alias wasn't defined, the
installer would automatically create one.
If we had this in place, I'd strengthen the advice in R-Exts not to
bother with a manually created INDEX file: that information should go
into a manually created <pkg>.package topic instead.
Duncan Murdoch
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