From ggrothendieck at gmail.com  Thu Nov 15 02:53:17 2007
From: ggrothendieck at gmail.com (Gabor Grothendieck)
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:53:17 -0500
Subject: [Rd] faqs
In-Reply-To: <D4F43809-6D74-4FA4-92AB-0A9248072A1A@ysidro.econ.uiuc.edu>
References: <D4F43809-6D74-4FA4-92AB-0A9248072A1A@ysidro.econ.uiuc.edu>
Message-ID: <971536df0711141753r5753c3c5i6faf438bd65ebc03@mail.gmail.com>

Another possibility is to just place it at the end of the vignette.
That is where it is in the proto package:

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/vignettes/proto/proto.pdf

Package documentation is already quite scattered and adding
a faq() command would add just one more thing one has
to do.  Here are some places one might look already for
documentation:

package?mypackage
vignette(...)
library(help = mypackage)
?mycommand
home page
WISHLIST file
NEWS file
THANKS file
svn log

I personally would give a much higher priority to a standardized
place to find change information.  Some packages provide it.
Some don't which is very frustrating since you see a new version
and have no idea what has changed.  If they do document it you
often have to download the source just to get at the change information.



On Nov 14, 2007 8:22 PM, roger koenker <roger at ysidro.econ.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> An extremely modest proposal:
>
> It would be nice if packages could have a FAQ and if
>
>        faq(package.name)
>
> would produce this faq.  And if, by default
>
>        faq()
>        FAQ()
>
> would produce the admirable R faq...  Apologies in advance
> if there is already a mechanism like this, but help.search()
> didn't reveal anything.
>
> url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger                Roger Koenker
> email   rkoenker at uiuc.edu                       Department of Economics
> vox:    217-333-4558                            University of Illinois
> fax:    217-244-6678                            Champaign, IL 61820
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>



[Rd] faqs
Gabor Grothendieck