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.
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.
Comments, please.
Duncan Murdoch
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