> 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.)
I've now committed some of this to R-devel, and I invite comments. I've abandoned the idea of the check, which seems too controversial. I've done the second and third items, but not the 4th.
I wrote about a dozen of these files this afternoon as I was refining promptPackage. It is very quick to generate a basic man page using promptPackage with an option saying you want a final version. Manually editing this file, running it through checks, etc. took me around 10-20 minutes per package.
I only did the base packages, and they probably have less in their overview than most contributors would want, so someone starting from nothing would probably take longer --- but many packages already have the text written somewhere, and they just need to add an alias to an Rd file, or perhaps reformat an INDEX file.
Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
