On 30/01/2018 4:30 PM, Kenny Bell wrote:
In response to Duncan regarding the use of roxygen2 from the point of view
of a current user, I believe the issue he brings up is one of correlation
rather than causation.
Could be. However, I think editing comments in a .R file is a bit
harder than editing text in a .Rd file, so I think the format
discourages editing. I think it does make it easier to pass R CMD check
the first time, but I don't think you should be satisfied with that.
What would probably change my mind would be a two-way (or multi-way)
tool: it takes input in Roxygen comments or Rd files (or something
else), and produces another format. Then I'd probably choose to write
the first pass in Roxygen, and convert to Rd for editing. Other people
might go in the opposite direction. Or someone might write a fancy
WYSIWYG editor for people who like that style of editing.
A couple of years ago I was hoping someone would figure out a way to
create help page input in R Markdown, but I think that's tricky because
of the lack of semantic markup there. There *was* a project last year
to work on other input methods; I dropped out before it got very far,
and I don't know its current status.
Writing my first piece of R documentation was made much easier by using
roxygen2, and it shallowed the learning curve substantially.
I'm not completely up to date on Roxygen2 these days: can you do some
pages in Rd, others in Roxygen? That's not quite as good as being able
to switch back and forth, but it would allow you to start in Roxygen,
then gradually move to Rd when editing there was easier.
What Duncan may be observing is a general tendency of roxygen2 users to
write overly concise documentation. However, I believe this to be caused by
an omitted variable - likely the tendency of roxygen2 users to want outputs
quickly. I can't see anything in roxygen2 that might suggest a causal link
but I'd be interested in hearing specific examples.
I don't know about that. *Everyone* wants output quickly.
Duncan Murdoch
FWIW, I've also heard the same documentation criticism leveled at R in
general (mostly from Stata and MATLAB users).
Kenny
On Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 10:12 AM Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> wrote:
Mehmet,
That is a loaded topic, not unlikely other topics preoccupying us these
days.
There is package.skeleton() in base R as you already mentioned. It drove me
bonkers that it creates packages which then fail R CMD check, so I wrote a
wrapper package (pkgKitten) with another helper function (kitten()) which
calls the base R helper and then cleans up it---but otherwise remains
faithful to it.
These days pkgKitten defaults to creating per-package top-level help page
that just references content from DESCRIPTION via a set of newer Rd macros
as
I find that helps keeping them aligned. The most recent example of mine is
https://github.com/eddelbuettel/prrd/blob/master/man/prrd-package.Rd
I use either this function or the RStudio template helper all the time.
And similarly, other people written similar helpers. You may get other
pointers.
And every couple of months someone writes a new tutorial about how to
write a
first package. Then social media goes gaga and we get half a dozen blog
posts
where someone celebrates finding said tutorial, reading it and following
through with a new package.
And many of us taught workshops on creating packages. There is a lot of
material out here, though lots of this material seems to be entirely
ignorant
of what came before it.
And there has been lots, including Fritz's tutorial from a decade ago:
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/6175/ as well as on CRAN as
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Leisch-CreatingPackages.pdf
So I'd recommend you just experiment and set up your own helpers. After all
the rule still holds: Anything you do more than three times should be a
function, and every function should be in a package. So customize _your_
function to create your package.
Dirk
--
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org
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