RFC: What should ?foo do?
Duncan Murdoch wrote:
Currently ?foo does help("foo"), which looks for a man page with alias
foo. If foo happens to be a function call, it will do a bit more, so
?mean(something)
will find the mean method for something if mean happens to be an S4
generic. There are also the type?foo variations, e.g. methods?foo, or
package?foo.
I think these are all too limited.
The easiest search should be the most permissive. Users should need to
do extra work to limit their search to man pages, with exact matches, as
? does.
While I like the idea, I don't really agree with the sentiment above. I think that the easiest search should be the one that you want the result of most often. And at least for me that is the man page for the function, so I can check some detail; and it works pretty well. I use site searches much less frequently and would be happy to type more for them.
We don't currently have a general purpose search for "foo", or something
like it. We come close with RSiteSearch, and so possibly ?foo should
mean RSiteSearch("foo"), but
there are problems with that: it can't limit itself to the current
version of R, and it doesn't work when you're offline (or when
search.r-project.org is down.) We also have help.search("foo"), but it
is too limited. I'd like to have a local search that looks through the
man pages, manuals, FAQs, vignettes, DESCRIPTION files, etc., specific
to the current R installation, and I think ? should be attached to that
search.
I think that would be very useful (although there will be some decisions on which tool to use to achieve this). But, it will also be problematic, as one will get tons of hits for some things, and then selecting the one you really want will be a pain. I would rather see that be one of the dyadic forms, say site?foo or all?foo one could even imagine refining that for different subsets of the docs you have mentioned; help?foo #only man pages guides?foo #the manuals, R Extensions etc and so on. You did not, make a suggestion as to how we would get the equivalent of ?foo now, if a decision to move were taken.
Comments, please. Duncan Murdoch
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