From Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at  Fri May 25 18:34:36 2001
From: Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at (Kurt Hornik)
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 19:34:36 +0200
Subject: RE^2: [Rd] New generic functions in "R base" {was `truncate'}
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.10.10105251311040.18933-100000@hsph.harvard.edu>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.31.0105251715400.1160-100000@gannet.stats>
 <Pine.GSO.4.10.10105251311040.18933-100000@hsph.harvard.edu>
Message-ID: <15118.38828.632164.173037@mithrandir.hornik.net>

>>>>> Byron Ellis writes:

> I think the proposal was for something along the lines of Perl's CPAN
> module (or ActiveState's PPM for that matter)---sure, you have to
> update indices periodically, but whatever. Perhaps some sort HTTP
> based system for performing full text queries (since the database for
> that sort of thing will undoubtably be large) would be in order, but
> the spirit of the idea is certainly a good one---especially for new
> users (students, etc) who don't know the system like the back of their
> hand. 'sides, kids these days aren't used to things like manpages and
> apropos. ;-)

> ...

Sorry for entering this a bit late.  The CRAN maintainers have actually
decided implementing something along the above lines a long time ago.
Unfortunately, it simply has not happened thus far.  In a way, this
would be a good project for a computer science student ...

In a nutshell, I see two approaches.  One amounts to having a web front
end for help.search() which Brian kindly pointed out.  I.e., CRAN would
have a prebuilt help db for all packages it provides, and a search
mechanism patterned after help.search() [you do not necessarily need an
R process for the search].  Full-text search fanatics might prefer us to
simply `install' all HTML files of the CRAN packages to some place and
provide full-text indexing and searching of that.

[To those who haven't read from me about this: full-text index/search
alone does not solve the problem.  You want fuzzy matching a la glimpse
along with that, otherwise e.g. spelling differences cannot be
resolved.]

As we hope that R 1.3.0 will support multiple package repositories, the
question *where* to search will become more delicated.  For example, the
packages by Jim Lindsey are not distributed via CRAN ...

If there are any volunteers for implementing this, pls let us know.

-k

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RE^2: [Rd] New generic functions in "R base" {was `truncate'}
Kurt Hornik