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"`R notes' should be better"

3 messages · Martin Maechler, Bill Simpson, Kurt Hornik

Original
Martin Maechler
# 
[CC'ed  to R-devel, not R-help]
Bill> Thanks very much Douglas for the pointer to nlm.  Maybe the
    Bill> "Notes on R" maintainer can add at least a mention of nlm in the
	   ======================
    Bill> section on nonlinear fitting?

    Bill>    .....

    Bill> (This example could replace the current nonlinear fitting section
    Bill> in "Notes on R")


You are talking of  <CRAN>/doc/Rnotes.ps, or Rnotes.tgz respectively,
yes?
The first page states both R & R as authors (beside Venables & D.Smith).
However, I doubt if they consider themselves as 'maintainers' 
of these notes (due to lack of time), or do you?

	Ross?  Robert?

The problem is that these notes need more work than just ('nls' <-> 'nlm').

Maybe I should ask again for volunteers, or maybe even a discussion 
on what could / should be done.

The notes have several sections (organized in different *.tex files) in
Rnotes.tgz.
Could(/should) we have different authors (ie. volunteers from among you)
for these sections?

About a year ago or so, Kurt Hornik proposed that these notes should become
chapter 1 -- n of ``the book'' where
the current things in  RHOME/doc/manual/Man.tex are just the appendices
(they already *are* appendices, currently).
R & R instead,  originally thought (and have also started ??) of completely
rewriting from scratch these chapters (1 -- n).

Which should be done (and by whom) ?

In the case of "R notes upgrading, 
it'd make sense if someone first works thru the current notes 
and makes them (somewhat) ``compatible'' with the  Rd.sty that we
currently use for the help-manual (i.e. the  doc/manual/... things).

------

Martin
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Bill Simpson
# 
Hi Martin et al.,

Well I started this BUT I didn't say "'R Notes' should be better"!!
I think the Notes are great!
I would be happy to make the changes to this nonlinear fitting section,
once I know how to do nonlinear fitting with nlm.  However I use LyX
(which doesn't read *.tex files), and I would characterize myself as a
novice with R, with unix, with LaTeX, etc.
I wouldn't be able to do this, due to ignorance.

Bill Simpson

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Kurt Hornik
# 
Bill> Thanks very much Douglas for the pointer to nlm.  Maybe the
Bill> "Notes on R" maintainer can add at least a mention of nlm in the
Bill> section on nonlinear fitting?

Bill> .....

Bill> (This example could replace the current nonlinear fitting section
Bill> in "Notes on R")
We DEFINITELY need to do something about R notes very soon.  The 0.61
tree should be frozen by this weekend, 0.62 needs the bug fixes that we
know of, the re-implementation of factors (asap, please!) and docs for
the new graphics things (dev.xxx), but that's about it, I would say (we
can have the `real' make install things later).

Working on Rnotes should at least come right after that.

I am no longer sure about LaTeX and my suggestion from about a year ago,
though.  I would more be in favor of having a Texinfo version as I could
also use this on-line via info, but perhaps everyone else thinks that I
should use now-free Netscape for doing that (my experience is that the
conversion Texinfo -> HTML is trivial whereas I am never sure about
latex2html or hyperlatex).

In any case, I perhaps could try to go through Rnotes sometimes this
weekend to find out what most urgently needs fixing.

-k
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