[Rd] RFC: allow packages to advertise vignettes on Windows

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Duncan" == Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
>>>>>     on Wed, 16 May 2007 12:51:35 -0400 writes:

    Duncan> On 5/16/2007 11:58 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
    >> Um .. I'm not quite sure I understand - all you have to do is
    >> v=vignette(); v$results[v$results[,1] %in% search(),]
    >> or am I missing something?

    Duncan> In the interest of avoiding duplication and speeding up the calculation, 
    Duncan> I'd put this into the vignette() function (e.g. add an attached=FALSE 
    Duncan> argument).  I suspect on a system with several hundred installed 
    Duncan> packages vignette(attached=TRUE) could be quite a bit faster than 
    Duncan> searching all packages and subsetting afterwards.

Indeed, a good idea.
For me, with quite a bit in .libPath() but on a quite fast hi-memory machine,

> system.time(v <- vignette())

   user  system elapsed 
  7.349   6.257 145.329 

i.e. elapsed time of 2.5 minutes {with > 1100 installed packages}

    >> There is one thing that could be addressed I suppose - we don't have  
    >> any hooks for GUIs in the sense that R cannot tell the GUI that  
    >> something changed (e.g. a new package was installed). Right now each  
    >> GUI uses system's facilities (or asynchronous checks) to learn about  
    >> such events. This could be unified (as well as other aspects like  
    >> e.g.  the menu access).

    Duncan> Both of these things would be really nice, but I
    Duncan> wouldn't hold off on Seth's suggestion to wait for
    Duncan> them.

I agree.  I also agree with Simon that it makes sense trying to
provide as much as possible GUI-independently (and in way that is
as easily as possible "GUI-pluggable").

Martin