[Rd] Conditional importFrom (roxygen?)

[Hadley Wickham]

>> This has been submitted as an issue at
>>
>> https://github.com/klutometis/roxygen/issues/378
>>
>> closely related:
>>
>> https://github.com/klutometis/roxygen/issues/371
>>
>> my current hacky solution to this is to use a Makefile that
>> post-processes the NAMESPACE after it's roxygenized, e.g. search
>> for "getRversion" in
>>
>> https://github.com/glmmTMB/glmmTMB/blob/master/Makefile
>
> Hadley has the right idea (allow roxygen to specify some uninterpreted
> text to drop into the NAMESPACE file), but it doesn't go far enough.
> Really this is a design flaw in roxygen:  being able to enter NAMESPACE
> and help page info in source files is a great feature, but being forced
> to go all or nothing is a flaw.
>
> If base R adds something new to the NAMESPACE or .Rd files (or has some
> obscure feature that roxygen authors didn't notice), it's really hard
> for roxygen users to make use of it.

It should much easier in the dev version - you can use @rawRd and
@rawNamespace to insert literal Rd code and NAMESPACE directives
without any interpretation by roxygen.

> A better design would be to allow content from both sources:  some
> manually entered NAMESPACE stuff, and some automatically generated stuff.

I think you can now mostly do this - it might be possible to do more
intermingling, but it starts to get really hard to figure out which is
the authoritative version and to respond usefully to conflicts. I'm
not opposed to the idea, but it's a hard problem and unfortunately not
very high on my priority list.

> A really nice design would be to read the manually entered stuff and
> show (some of?) it in the .R files, but that would be really tricky to
> get right.  I think it would need to be supported by a GUI, it wouldn't
> be reasonable to expect people to type it all properly in a dumb editor.
>  Maybe Hadley knows someone who has written a GUI?

Nope, sorry :P

More seriously, again I think it would be possible, and it's not that
I'm opposed to it, but realistically, it's unlikely to ever get high
enough up our priority list to get implemented.

Hadley

-- 
http://had.co.nz/