From murdoch at stats.uwo.ca  Fri Feb 24 17:38:10 2006
From: murdoch at stats.uwo.ca (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:38:10 -0500
Subject: [Rd] Links to non-vignette documentation
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On 2/24/2006 9:29 AM, hadley wickham wrote:
>> No, there's no automatic building after the promptPackage call.  It's up
>> to you to decide which functions need to be mentioned to users.  In
>> large packages it usually doesn't make sense to list all the functions,
>> so the package writer needs to use judgement here.  There are other
>> mechanisms (e.g. ls("package:XXX") for a list of names, the help index
>> generation for a list of names and titles) to get a list of everything.
> 
> Ok, that seems reasonable, but perhaps promptPackage (or
> documentation) could make this more clear.
> 
>> There aren't any immediate plans to change help(package=XXX), but I
>> think in the long run, if package?XXX receives wider support than it has
>> now, it would make sense to make that change.
> 
> When was this form of package documentation created?  How are users
> supposed to know it exists?  I couldn't find any pointers to it from
> ?help, ?library or from help(package=XXX).

It's described in the Writing R Extensions Manual, in Writing R 
Documentation Files, Rd Format, Documenting Packages (section 2.1.4 in 
the PDF).

There probably should be more pointers to it...

Duncan Murdoch



[Rd] Links to non-vignette documentation
Duncan Murdoch