[Rd] Package manpage DCF hooks

[Paul Roebuck]

On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Martin Maechler wrote:

> >>>>> "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.

I'm aware of this, having used it in various places. What
I don't know is how to access/use it during package
installation (if even possible). Using read.dcf and a sed
script, I could probably manage to perform the template
merge. But I don't know how to invoke such without adding
a configure script (overkill for R-only packages), as
'install.R' is meant for something else.

> 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.

Well, a system-level approach would be preferable to doing
this per-package. R-2.3 then?

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