[R-pkg-devel] Public URLs for help for versions of base packages

[Ivan Krylov]

On Fri, 30 Jun 2023 06:19:33 +0100
David Hugh-Jones <davidhughjones using gmail.com> wrote:

> it would be burdensome in terms of data (and my time)

> More generally, shouldn’t there be publicly available versioned
> documentation? Python has had this for a long time.

CRAN has a searchable archive of R documentation for the whole CRAN at
https://search.r-project.org/, but only for the latest version of
everything. I would expect adding support for the whole history of R
base packages to be burdensome in terms of their time too, even without
considering the history of CRAN package documentation.

I suppose you could apply for a grant from the R Consortium (which
reports revenue similar to that of the Python Software Foundation) in
September or wait until next January or February and propose a Google
Summer of Docs project in order to have it done, but people in general
seem to dislike having to support infrastructure forever from now on for
projects that linearly grow in size.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan