From thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de  Tue May 15 12:52:27 2007
From: thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de (Thomas Friedrichsmeier)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 12:52:27 +0200
Subject: [Rd] RFC: allow packages to advertise vignettes on Windows
In-Reply-To: <464905A3.1010305@stats.uwo.ca>
References: <m21whj2e0c.fsf@ziti.local> <464905A3.1010305@stats.uwo.ca>
Message-ID: <200705151252.32084.thomas.friedrichsmeier@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>

On Tuesday 15 May 2007, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> I'm interested in making vignettes more visible. ?Putting them on the 
> menu is not the only way, but since you're offering to do the work, I 
> think it's a good idea :-).

[...]

>   - Should they appear in a top level Vignettes menu, or as a submenu of
> the Help menu?
>
> I'd lean towards keeping the top level placement, since you've already
> got an audience who are used to that.

I'd vote to try to leave this up to the GUI as much as possible. For example, 
in RKWard, I'd probably not want to create a top level "Vignettes" menu, as 
there is already a considerable number of top level menus present. Also, I'd 
like to add it to the context menu of the respective package environment item 
in our object browser. Further, I would not want to launch a pdf-viewer as a 
separate application, but rather display this info in an MDI-managed window.

So it looks like there is a number of decisions involved, which probably can't 
be answered uniformly across all GUIs (and plaforms!).

What I'd suggest is to make it easy for GUIs to override the default behavior, 
if they want to. For instance, from addVigs2Menu(), you could call a function 
like
	registerVignette(packagename, title, filename)
the default implementation of this function might well be just as you suggest 
(and empty on linux/when there is no GUI), but this way it would be easy for 
GUIs to override the behavior. Also, all platform specific code would be 
contained inside registerVignette(), only.

Regards
Thomas Friedrichsmeier
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[Rd] RFC: allow packages to advertise vignettes on Windows
Thomas Friedrichsmeier