[R] Creating bibtex file of all installed packages?

[S Devriese]

On 12/16/2009 08:32 AM, Achim Zeileis wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, Michael Friendly wrote:
>
>> Achim and others:
>>
>> Achim's solution could be directly usable if it also added a BibTeX key,
>> perhaps just the name of the package to the '@Manual{,' initial line
>> of each. I wrapped the previous suggestions in a function, and played
>> around with the components, but can't quite see how to account for the
>> failed citation calls.  Can anyone take the next step?
>
> I had also thought about this after sending my previous solution, so
> here is an update Michael's version of the function (renamed to the
> name of the default file). Apart from some smaller touch-ups this has
> the following changes:
>
>   - Instead of taking the unique() bibs, I now use the unique() pkgs.
>
>     (In principle, packages with the same name could be installed in
>     different libraries, potentially containing different citations.
>     But I thought it would be overkill to check for that.)
>
>   - Citation keys are simply "pkgname" if there is only a single
>     BibTeX item, and "pkgname1" to "pkgnameN" if there are N BibTeX
>     items.
>
>     (This does not assure that citation keys are unique, though. If
>     there is a package "foo" with 2 citation entries and another package
>     "foo2" with only a single entry, these could be confused. A
> workaround
>     would be to use "pkgname1" instead of "pkgname" as the citation key
>     even if there is a single citation only. But I thought that would
>     be less intuitive.)
Another possibility would be to use pkgname_versionnumber (e.g.
lattice1226). This would probably provide uniqueness and if used on
subsequent updates  of packages does not break older (latex) documents
where previous versions of packages were used.
Just a thought.

Stephan