[Rd] proposed changes to RSiteSearch

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 5/7/2009 10:18 AM, Jonathan Baron wrote:
> On 05/07/09 10:05, Liaw, Andy wrote:
>> Can someone in R Core please take a look at the attached patches to
>> RSiteSearch() and its help page?  I guess Jon is planning some changes
>> on his site.  Jon:  could you elaborate on what the patch does?
> 
> The idea is simply to remove the mail archives, so the search will be
> only of functions' help pages.  Eventually I will also add package
> vignettes, but I don't think we need anything special for that.  I
> can't imagine that someone would want to search just vignettes and not
> help pages, or the reverse.
> 
> The reasons are: 1. The mail archives are becoming increasingly
> difficult and time consuming for me to maintain.  2. There are now
> three other ways of searching mail archives, all of which seem much
> better than mine, but there seem to be no other good ways to search
> help pages for functions, and, indeed, the new RSiteSearch packages
> does only functions.  3. With only functions it would be much easier
> for someone to set up a complete mirror of my site, which seems like a
> good idea.

I'll incorporate the changes if you like.  What do you think of the idea 
of adding a gmane (or other archive) search to your results page?  Then 
if someone doesn't like what the man pages show, you can send them 
somewhere else, rather than leaving them to find out the other resources 
themselves.

gmane has sample code for this on their search page search.gmane.org, so 
it looks reasonably easy.  I'd suggest following their last example, 
with a drop-down box to select mailing lists, with comp.lang.r.* as an 
option for "all lists".

Duncan Murdoch