[Rd] Wishlist: Vignettes on CRAN

[Gabor Grothendieck]

This would certainly be nice.

Note that the BioConductor package vignettes are online:
   http://www.bioconductor.org/docs/vignettes.html
but there is nothing comparable for CRAN.

In some cases the package has a home page mentioned in the
URL field of the DESCRIPTION file and following that can sometimes
get vignette or other information although I agree we really need
a standardized way to discover that a vignette exists and to access
it without installing the package.

It would also be nice to be able to access the ChangeLog or NEWS
file online as well as from the installed package.  Currently one has
to download and unpack the source to get it in many cases and even
then one can't even be sure that it exists.  That's even worse than
the sitution with vignettes.

On 5/22/06, McGehee, Robert <Robert.McGehee at geodecapital.com> wrote:
> I was recently browsing through CRAN's Finance task view to remind
> myself of the publicly available packages relevant to my work. As the
> reference manuals are all online, I am able to flip through the
> available functions to get an idea of the package's scope before
> downloading.
>
> That said, many authors have taken the time to additionally provide a
> useful vignette which provides a better overview to complicated
> packages. However, as far as I can tell, the only way to read or even
> know if a package has a vignette is to first download and unpack the
> package source, which is inconvenient when one wants to understand a
> package _before_ installing.
>
> Perhaps an easy way to make vignettes more accessible to the end user
> would be to link the vignette PDF directly to the download page so that
> one could download it just as one can download the reference manual or
> package source. This both publicizes the vignette (since many users may
> even be unaware that a package has a vignette) and facilitates browsing.
>
> Just a thought!
>
> Best,
> Robert
>
> Robert McGehee
> Quantitative Analyst
> Geode Capital Management, LLC
> 53 State Street, 5th Floor | Boston, MA | 02109
> Tel: 617/392-8396    Fax:617/476-6389
> mailto:robert.mcgehee at geodecapital.com
>
>
>
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