From maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch  Thu Nov 12 09:21:58 2009
From: maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch (Martin Maechler)
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:21:58 +0100
Subject: [Rd] typo in docs for unlink()
In-Reply-To: <4AFB77A8.30802@userprimary.net>
References: <4AFA350D.7060303@acm.org> <4AFA3AA7.8080104@acm.org>
	<4AFA93B1.6050508@stats.uwo.ca> <4AFB77A8.30802@userprimary.net>
Message-ID: <19195.50598.636144.927120@lynne.math.ethz.ch>

>>>>> "SF" == Seth Falcon <seth at userprimary.net>
>>>>>     on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:49:12 -0800 writes:

    SF> On 11/11/09 2:36 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
    >> On 10/11/2009 11:16 PM, Tony Plate wrote:
    >>> PS, I should have said that I'm reading the docs for unlink in
    >>> R-2.10.0 on a Linux system. The docs that appear in a Windows
    >>> installation of R are different (the Windows docs do not mention that
    >>> not all systems support recursive=TRUE).
    >>> 
    >>> Here's a plea for docs to be uniform across all systems! Trying to
    >>> write R code that works on all systems is much harder when the docs
    >>> are different across systems, and you might only see system specific
    >>> notes on a different system than the one you're working on.
    >> 
    >> That's a good point, but in favour of the current practice, it is very
    >> irritating when searches take you to functions that don't work on your
    >> system.
    >> 
    >> One thing that might be possible is to render all versions of the help
    >> on all systems, but with some sort of indicator (e.g. a colour change)
    >> to indicate things that don't apply on your system, or only apply on
    >> your system. I think the hardest part of doing this would be designing
    >> the output; actually implementing it would not be so bad.

    SF> I would be strongly in favor of a change that provided documentation for 
    SF> all systems on all systems.

    SF> Since platform specific behavior for R functions is the exception rather 
    SF> than the norm, I would imagine that simply displaying doc sections by 
    SF> platform would be sufficient.

    SF> I think the benefit of being able to see what might not work on another 
    SF> platform far out weighs the inconvenience of finding doc during a search 
    SF> for something that only works on another platform -- hey, that still 
    SF> might be useful as it would tell you what platform you should use ;-)

I strongly agree.
As someone said, this only applies to relatively few help pages,
and I'm not sure if it's worth (at the moment) of first
designing a rendering scheme to emphasize your current platform.
Maybe even to the contrary, I'd want the PDF version of the
help page to (almost (*)) entirely platform independent.
It depends how thing *are* platform dependent.
If one function argument only applies to Windows, then the
corresponding paragraph could simply start,
"On Windows, .....".
In other situations, using something similar to what Henrik
proposed, a \section{..} on platform specific parts would
suffice.

I also find it very important that I read on "my" (OS) help page,
about less or more functionality on another platform, and I'd
rather want the full details of that platform than just 
a note that something is platform dependent.
Of course, there's the situation of missing / extra  capabilities()
but I think these are well documented where applicable, and they
*do* follow the idea that you should also learn about things
that are currently not available to you.

Martin



[Rd] typo in docs for unlink()
Martin Maechler