Documentation, more, more
Daniel Vainsencher
danielv at netvision.net.il
Fri Sep 12 08:31:01 UTC 2003
SM2 will provide a basis for a solution to that. Basically, you'd have
release-linked resources that can contain documentation. Writing tools
that integrate those into the Swiki and expose them systematically would
then be a SMOP ;-)
Daniel
"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> Daniel Vainsencher <danielv at netvision.net.il> wrote:
> > (5) Loading and installing a package over the internet is simple,
> > as is automatically updating one. This also brings the documentation
> > across; there are never _two_ downloads.
> This is the same as SM? or do they deal with depenedencies?
>
> SM is in some ways easier to use. Downloading a package from CRAN,
> you have to use a web browser to find a package, then you are best
> to use R to download and install it. SM can do this from the one place.
>
> On the other hand, if you point your browser at a CRAN site
> the thing that catches your eye at the foot of the first screen
> is "Installation of Packages".
>
> They do handle dependencies. Here's the DESCRIPTION file from the
> package I got most recently:
>
> Package: compiler
> Version: 0.1-0
> Author: Luke Tierney <luke at stat.uiowa.edu>
> Description: byte code compiler for R
> Title: Byte Code Compiler for R
> Depends: R (>= 1.8)
> Maintainer: Luke Tierney <luke at stat.uiowa.edu>
> License: GPL
>
> Since I have R 1.7.1 (which is the latest release; 1.8.0 has not been
> officially releaseed yet), this package will not load in my copy of R.
>
> The next thing to catch your eye after "Installation of Packages"
> is
> Daily Package Check Results
>
> (Almost) all packages are tested deaily on a machine running
> Debian Linux. The results of "R CMD check" for the current
> release versions of R, the patched and development version
> are summarized in the <A>check summary</A>.
>
> For example, I can easily see that the HMisc package works (with some
> relatively minor quibbles) in the version I have, but _doesn't_ work in
> the new system.
>
> And the next thing after _that_ is
>
> Writing Your Own Packages.
>
> I think we should think about how the Swiki and "internal
> documentation" can be made one.
>
> I've said this before, but the _last_ thing I need is documentation
> I can't reach. My home machine is not connected to the net and won't
> be. When I install Squeak on a machine, the internal documentation
> needs to be _there_. (Yes, I also run R on my home machine.)
>
> When you are considering getting a package from CRAN, you see
> something like this:
>
> <A>abind</B>: Combine multidimensional arrays
> Combine multi-dimensional arrays. This is a generalization of
> cbind and rbind. Takes a sequence of vectors, matrices, or arrays
> and produces a single array of the same or higher dimension.
> Version: 1.0-1
> Depends: R (>= 1.5.0)
> Date: 2003-06-10
> Author: ....
> Maintainer: ....
> Licence: ....
> <A>Index of Contenxt</A> (Text)
> <A>Reference Manual</A> (PDF)
>
> So the documentation is there on the web; you can read it before you
> decide to download. But when you DO decide to download, you get the
> documentation. If someone updates the version on CRAN, you don't find
> that you are suddenly looking at documentation for the new version
> while running the old one. I mislike the word "caching" here; the
> documentation I want at hand is the documentation for the packages/
> change-sets/whatever that I have actually chosen to use, not some other
> version, so I don't want some tool helpfully "updating" my documentation.
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