[R] R help question: How can we enable useRs to contribute corrections to help files faster ?

Gabor Grothendieck ggrothendieck at gmail.com
Sun Feb 28 13:19:30 CET 2010


The name of the package is at the top of each help page and then
library(help = myPackage) would get you the maintainer info.  Or in
place of the last step googling for CRAN myPackage would get to a page
like this:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/zoo/index.html
so it could be done in two steps.

What would be nice would be if the R help systems HTML help page for
each command had a link to a local version of the above page for the
associated package (and perhaps the HTML Index page for the package
would also link to it).  Then it would just be a matter of bringing up
the help page and clicking on the package name at the top.

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 5:44 AM, Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello dear R users,
>
>
> *Here is the background for my question:*
>
> I just had a look at the help file for
> ? Yeast
> in the "HistData" package.
>
> In it, I found a small spelling mistake where the word "*c*istribution" was
> written instead (so I imagin) "*d*istribution".
> I thought maybe I should e-mail the developer. Since there is no link to
> contacting the developer inside that help page, I went and googled the
> package name. Found it's place on cran (in the third result), where I found
> the maintainer to be Michael Friendly <friendly at yorku.ca>  (Whom I am
> corresponding to this e-mail).
>
> So it took me three steps to send a tiny typo: search the package on google,
> find the maintainer e-mail (where "at" should be changed to "@"), and
> writing an e-mail.
> How could this have been faster?
>
> *Proposed solutions:*
>
> One (simple) way, is for the help page to have the maintainer e-mail present
> at the bottom of every help page. Where upon clicking the link - an e-mail
> will popup with the e-mails subject header containing the package and the
> relevant help page title.
> Another (more complex, but more scalable) way, is if the help page could
> have been also present on some wiki. Inside the help page, there would be a
> link to an "edit" section on the online wikipedia (R-help-epidia)- where I
> could have just went and fixed the type.
>
>  What do you think, and who should I propose this to?
>
> Best,
> Tal
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----------------Contact
> Details:-------------------------------------------------------
> Contact me: Tal.Galili at gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
> Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
> www.r-statistics.com (English)
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