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Wishlist for promptPackage / index

2 messages · Peter Ruckdeschel, Duncan Murdoch

Original
Peter Ruckdeschel
# 
Hi R-devels,

would it be possible to enhance either promptPackage()
or the default indexing mechanism for packages
so that -- if it exists -- (the contents of) file
<pkgname>-package.Rd is sorted first in
 
  * the .dvi / .pdf  documentation file
  * the .chm  documentation file
  * the package 00index.html  documentation file

?

So far I found the following "hand-made" solution for me:
(1) rename the <pkgname>-package.Rd file to, say,
 0<pkgname>-package.Rd
(2) change the \name -field to
       \name{(<pkgname>-package)}
(note the parentheses in order to sort this file before
 any operators like "+", "-" etc..)

This is probably not quite the way it should be, but
at least it works under my standard-settings.

A more refined strategy would probably also take
into account something like a Collate field in
the DESCRIPTION field.

What is the opinion of R-Core to this question?

Thank you already
Peter
Duncan Murdoch
#
On 4/18/2006 7:02 PM, Peter Ruckdeschel wrote:
They already sort first in the last of those.  I don't think it is 
really possible in the index of a .chm file; they are alphabetical 
sorting only, as far as I know.  (The package topic does sort first in 
the main contents page, which is the same as the 00index.html file.)

It probably makes sense in a .dvi/.pdf, but as far as I recall, at the 
time I thought those were produced by the shell script for Rd2dvi, and 
it just seemed like too much trouble to change the collation order 
there.  In fact, now I look closer I see they are produced by the Perl 
script tools/pkg2tex.pl so it shouldn't be hard to port the changes I 
made to Rdlists.pm over.  I'll take a look.

Duncan Murdoch