[Rd] proposed changes to RSiteSearch

[Jonathan Baron]

After reading all this, I favor doing one of two things:

1. Put all the search stuff, including the proposed gmane function, in
   Spencer's new package but make it one of the default packages, like
   utils, etc., or,

2. Put everything in utils, including Spencer's new package and the
   gmane function.

I do not know enough to choose between these.

On 05/07/09 14:42, spencerg wrote:
>       1.  Whatever we do with the "RSiteSearch" function, it should 
> still be available every time R starts.  If we put it in its own 
> package, it should still be autoloaded with "base", "utils", "stats", etc. 

Good point.

>       2.  Sundar indicated to me that, "if Jonathan would like to remove 
> the search capability, it would be rather simple to move RSiteSearch to 
> nabble" for the listserve archives.  The "RSiteSearch" function could be 
> modified to combine that with a separate search of only the help pages 
> on Jonathan's server. 

I do not understand "rather simple" at all.  For those who are
interested, I've put my notes on how to manage my site (which still
need a bit of revision, but this will give you some idea of what is
involved) in

http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/~baron/notes.namazu.txt

The problem is that I have not found a way to automate this, so I
still spend several hours each month doing it by hand.  Too many
little glitches come up along the way, and the main problem is the
mailing lists.  Moreover, Namazu just doesn't work all that well for
mailing lists of this size, because of the page footers in each post.
(Now I remove them.  That was a bad idea.  But if we're going to get
rid of this anyway I will not take the time to figure out how to put
them back properly.)

Also, Liviu Androic argued that vignettes should be searchable
separately from help pages.  This makes sense, but I would strongly
prefer to move ahead on other changes and leave this until later.
The need for this sort of modification is what makes me favor option
#1 at the beginning (separate package) on the theory that it would be
easier for me to make changes than if it were part of utils, but I
don't know how this works.

So, if someone can make a decision about how to proceed, I'll do what
I can, as soon as I can.

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron