From Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at  Wed Jul 14 15:56:23 1999
From: Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at (Kurt Hornik)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 16:56:23 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: docs: topic && availability
Message-ID: <14220.42263.633620.65936@fangorn.ci.tuwien.ac.at>

I think that users quite often want to answers to questions like ``Is
there something to do FOO in R?'', where FOO might e.g. be ``isotonic
regression''.  The answer should be something like ``you can use BAR in
package BAZ, or ...''.

For this, full text search is not the right approach and the keywords
are not enough.  We could maybe search dedicated fields (like \title),
but I think what we really want is something like an \index{} entry.
(I am not sure whether we want concept/variable/function/... indices a
la Texinfo.)

Access/retrieval could even happen on the command line via something
like
	help(topic = "FOO")

However, I am not sure what the right back-end is.  We definitely do not
want to confine the search to the loaded packages.  But even the locally
available ones are not enough.  On the other hand, I don't think doing
all topic lookups via CRAN is the right thing, either.  So maybe

	help(topic = "FOO")

would use all topic indices in R_LIBS but there could be a message
indicating that one can also use CRAN for lookup via WWW.

Opinions?

-k
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docs: topic && availability
Kurt Hornik