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

[Thomas Petzoldt]

Dear R Developers,

first of all, many thanks for the constructive discussion. My question
was related to the use of existing mechanisms that (in my opinion) would
help to make package documentation more user-friendly. I agree that
additional restrictions/requirements on packages that do not not have
explicit objectives on performance or validity have to be avoided.

Thomas Petzoldt

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Summary and Wish-list

1 A recommendation to provide a file "foo-package.Rd" and an
\alias{foo} was already given in "Writing R Extensions".

2 In order to ensure consistency between foo-package.Rd, DESCRIPTION and
other sources of information, a mechanism to use variables and/or macros
in .Rd format is desirable.

3 There may be reasons, where manual creation and maintenance of
foo-package.Rd is not wanted, i.e. work load or danger of information
inconsistency. For such cases, an automated mechanism during package
installation may be helpful.

Already existing functions like

library(help="foo")
   or
promptPackage("foo", final=TRUE)

can do the job but may require extensions (hyperlinks).

4 The standard help format on Windows .chm should also find a way to
provide hyperlinks to package vignettes (and other pdfs), either
directly in the package index (as in html) or in foo-package.Rd