From tlumley at u.washington.edu  Tue Jun  7 16:18:31 2005
From: tlumley at u.washington.edu (Thomas Lumley)
Date: Tue Jun  7 16:18:48 2005
Subject: [Rd] Suggestion: help(<package name>)
In-Reply-To: <42A5851C.3080102@maths.lth.se>
References: <42A57F5D.7080505@maths.lth.se>
	<17061.32946.976628.961120@beren.wu-wien.ac.at>
	<42A5851C.3080102@maths.lth.se>
Message-ID: <Pine.A41.4.61b.0506070712110.228936@homer05.u.washington.edu>

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:

> Kurt Hornik wrote:
>> 
>> How would this be different from the results of
>> 
>> 	help(package = <package name>)
>> 
>> ?
>
> Thanks for that. I was not aware of this one; I like how DESCRIPTION is 
> included and how the index is divided in functions and dataset, e.g. 
> help(package=MASS). May I also suggest that the CITATION file is included 
> here, e.g. help(package=foreign).
>
> My suggestion differ in the sense that 1) additional information may be 
> included such as which functions are "main" functions and which are of less 
> interest, and 2) that it would show up in the HTML index page too.
>

For point (1) you can write your own INDEX file, in which case it can have 
more information than the auto-generated one.  A simple example is the 
survey package.  My description of the INDEX file in courses has been that 
it contains a line for every "sufficiently interesting" function. Writing 
R Extensions says that "normally this file is missing" but I think this is 
descriptive rather than prescriptive.

2) seems sensible.  The INDEX file is included in the CRAN page and I find 
it useful there.


 	-thomas


[Rd] Suggestion: help(<package name>)
Thomas Lumley