[Rd] Package manpage DCF hooks

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Roebuck <roebuck at mdanderson.org>
>>>>>     on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 15:57:04 -0600 (CST) writes:

    Paul> On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
    >> On 11/14/05, Paul Roebuck <roebuck at mdanderson.org> wrote:
    >> 
    >> > Was looking at what was output for <pkgname>-package.Rd
    >> > and wondered if any there was any means (via macro, etc)
    >> > to merge some of the same information with a template
    >> > for my package manpage? As much (all?) of the generated
    >> > information was already provided in the DESCRIPTION, I'd
    >> > prefer not to have to update the information in multiple
    >> > places. I'm thinking here that I could provide a template
    >> > file "<pkgname>-package.Rd.in" and during build, the
    >> > DCF information could be substituted appropriately and
    >> > "<pkgname>-package.Rd" would be output.
    >> >
    >> > see also:
    >> >    promptPackage method
    >> 
    >> What I do is make my whatever-package.Rd page be
    >> the central page where one can get a list of all
    >> the other places one can look for info (rather than
    >> placing the info itself there).  See, for example,
    >> 
    >> library(dyn)
    >> package?dyn

    Paul> Thanks for your reply. That gives me some additional
    Paul> ideas but still think being able to display DCF
    Paul> information and public function listing would be a nice
    Paul> thing to have. For example, 'dyn-package.Rd' repeats its
    Paul> DCF description.

which I agree is not ideal.  I agree that such information
should in principle reside in one place and be
``auto-distributed'' to other places during package installation
and maybe also package load time.

Note that  packageDescription("dyn")
returns an object that contains (and may print if you want) the
DCF information.

One possibility I see would be the convention that the 
'generated' (text, html, tex) help files for  'package-<name>' 
would combine both the packageDescription() and
the contents of  <name>-package.Rd.  

Martin