Package manpage DCF hooks
On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Martin Maechler wrote:
"Paul" == Paul Roebuck <roebuck at mdanderson.org>
on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 15:57:04 -0600 (CST) writes:
Paul> On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>> On 11/14/05, Paul Roebuck <roebuck at mdanderson.org> wrote:
>>
>> > Was looking at what was output for <pkgname>-package.Rd
>> > and wondered if any there was any means (via macro, etc)
>> > to merge some of the same information with a template
>> > for my package manpage? As much (all?) of the generated
>> > information was already provided in the DESCRIPTION, I'd
>> > prefer not to have to update the information in multiple
>> > places. I'm thinking here that I could provide a template
>> > file "<pkgname>-package.Rd.in" and during build, the
>> > DCF information could be substituted appropriately and
>> > "<pkgname>-package.Rd" would be output.
>> >
>> > see also:
>> > promptPackage method
>>
>> What I do is make my whatever-package.Rd page be
>> the central page where one can get a list of all
>> the other places one can look for info (rather than
>> placing the info itself there). See, for example,
>>
>> library(dyn)
>> package?dyn
Paul> Thanks for your reply. That gives me some additional
Paul> ideas but still think being able to display DCF
Paul> information and public function listing would be a nice
Paul> thing to have. For example, 'dyn-package.Rd' repeats its
Paul> DCF description.
which I agree is not ideal. I agree that such information
should in principle reside in one place and be
``auto-distributed'' to other places during package installation
and maybe also package load time.
Note that packageDescription("dyn") returns an object that
contains (and may print if you want) the DCF information.
I'm aware of this, having used it in various places. What I don't know is how to access/use it during package installation (if even possible). Using read.dcf and a sed script, I could probably manage to perform the template merge. But I don't know how to invoke such without adding a configure script (overkill for R-only packages), as 'install.R' is meant for something else.
One possibility I see would be the convention that the 'generated' (text, html, tex) help files for 'package-<name>' would combine both the packageDescription() and the contents of <name>-package.Rd.
Well, a system-level approach would be preferable to doing this per-package. R-2.3 then? ---------------------------------------------------------- SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)