[Rd] a small suggestion for improving the building of packages

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

I agree with Kevin, I never run package.skeleton more than once.  But
one advantage to running it over and over again is if you change the
names or the ordering of function arguments.  That gets autowritten
and I could see that being convenient if you change those a lot (as
you sometime do in development)

Kasper

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Kevin R. Coombes
<kevin.r.coombes at gmail.com> wrote:
>  The phrase that caught my attention in your post is the one about "running
> package.skeleton() over and over".  When I'm developing packages, I never
> run it more than once.  And I usually delete a lot of the files it produces
> (since I like to organize my functions in logical batches and  not in
> separate files).  And once I think I have the file structure organized, I
> put everything under version control and run future development out that
> system.
>
> Can you explain why you would need to re-run package.skeleton()? Is there
> some use case that I am missing?
>
>    Kevin
>
> On 9/16/2010 1:18 PM, Janko Thyson wrote:
>>
>> Dear Uwe,
>> in principle, I totally agree with your point of politely forcing
>> developers
>> to write well documented packages. However, when you're trying to put
>> together a package, you (or at least I) never get it completely right on
>> the
>> first, say, 20 tries ;-) Yet, by running package.skelleton() over and over
>> to keep track of changes you made during the process, you overwrite all Rd
>> files each time - including the ones that you might already have put a lot
>> of effort into. And delaying documentation to the very end of the process
>> is
>> probably not the best idea either ;-) IMHO the community should favor the
>> approaches taken by packages such as roxygen or inlinedocs as at least it
>> provides some sort of direct synchronization between code and
>> documentation.
>> Maybe one could agree on rejecting code that is missing roxygen or
>> inlinedoc
>> code, which would ensure that code is documented properly. In fact, isn't
>> programming all about automating unnecessary manual procedures? I would
>> count starting from scratch with all help files time and time again to be
>> one of those unnecessary procedures. This time could better be invested in
>> increasing the package's functionality.
>>
>> Best regards, my thanks go out to everyone as well,
>> Janko
>
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