[Rd] Links to non-vignette documentation
Duncan Murdoch
murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Fri Feb 24 17:38:10 CET 2006
On 2/24/2006 9:29 AM, hadley wickham wrote:
>> No, there's no automatic building after the promptPackage call. It's up
>> to you to decide which functions need to be mentioned to users. In
>> large packages it usually doesn't make sense to list all the functions,
>> so the package writer needs to use judgement here. There are other
>> mechanisms (e.g. ls("package:XXX") for a list of names, the help index
>> generation for a list of names and titles) to get a list of everything.
>
> Ok, that seems reasonable, but perhaps promptPackage (or
> documentation) could make this more clear.
>
>> There aren't any immediate plans to change help(package=XXX), but I
>> think in the long run, if package?XXX receives wider support than it has
>> now, it would make sense to make that change.
>
> When was this form of package documentation created? How are users
> supposed to know it exists? I couldn't find any pointers to it from
> ?help, ?library or from help(package=XXX).
It's described in the Writing R Extensions Manual, in Writing R
Documentation Files, Rd Format, Documenting Packages (section 2.1.4 in
the PDF).
There probably should be more pointers to it...
Duncan Murdoch
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