[Rd] why is \alias{anRpackage} not mandatory?

[hadley wickham]

>> - there are lots of packages without one, so this would create a lot of
>> work for people to add them.
>
> No, I don't think that this is too much work. Positively speaking, it's one
> small contribution to bring more light into the exponentially growing
> haystack.

It may not be much work for you, but I find any additional
requirements to the package format to be a real pain.  I have ~10
packages on CRAN and having to go through and add this extra
information all at once is a big hassle.  R releases tend to happen in
the middle of the US academic semester when I have a lot of other
things on my plate.

Additionally, I find that rdoc is the wrong format for lengthy
explanation and exposition - a pdf is much better - and I think that
the packages already have a abstract: the description field in
DESCRIPTION.  The main problem with vignettes at the moment is that
they must be sweave, a format which I don't really like.  I wish I
could supply my own pdf + R code file produced using whatever tools I
choose.

Hadley



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