[Rd] Query: Could documentation include modernized references?

[J C Nash]

A tangential email discussion with Simon U. has highlighted a long-standing
matter that some tools in the base R distribution are outdated, but that
so many examples and other tools may use them that they cannot be deprecated.

The examples that I am most familiar with concern optimization and nonlinear
least squares, but other workers will surely be able to suggest cases elsewhere.
I was the source (in Pascal) of Nelder-Mead, BFGS and CG algorithms in optim().
BFGS is still mostly competitive, and Nelder-Mead is useful for initial exploration
of an optimization problem, but CG was never very good, right from the mid-1970s
well before it was interfaced to R. By contrast Rcgmin works rather well
considering how similar it is in nature to CG. Yet I continue to see use and
even recommendations of these tools in inappropriate circumstances.

Given that it would break too many other packages and examples to drop the
existing tools, should we at least add short notes in the man (.Rd) pages?
I'm thinking of something like

    optim() has methods that are dated. Users are urged to consider suggestions
    from ...

and point to references and/or an appropriate Task View, which could, of course,
be in the references.

I have no idea what steps are needed to make such edits to the man pages. Would
R-core need to be directly involved, or could one or two trusted R developers
be given privileges to seek advice on and implement such modest documentation
additions?  FWIW, I'm willing to participate in such an effort, which I believe
would help users to use appropriate and up-to-date tools.

John Nash