[R] R help question: How can we enable useRs to contribute corrections to help files faster ?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 8:59 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> On 28/02/2010 7:19 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>
>> The name of the package is at the top of each help page and then
>> library(help = myPackage) would get you the maintainer info.  Or in
>> place of the last step googling for CRAN myPackage would get to a page
>> like this:
>> http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/zoo/index.html
>> so it could be done in two steps.
>>
>> What would be nice would be if the R help systems HTML help page for
>> each command had a link to a local version of the above page for the
>> associated package (and perhaps the HTML Index page for the package
>> would also link to it).  Then it would just be a matter of bringing up
>> the help page and clicking on the package name at the top.
>
> Not all of the information on that page would make sense locally.  Some of
> it is there to help you decide whether to download the package, or to
> actually download it.
>
> The things I see that aren't available in the package index page in R-devel:
>
>  - CRAN checks
>  - download links
>  - reverse dependencies
>
> Am I missing something?  None of those seem like they'd be sensible locally.

By Index page I was referring to the page you get when you click Index
at the bottom of any HTML help file.  After clicking Index you get an
HTML page that gives a clickable list of help pages for that package.
You don`t get the description of the package, the name and contact
info to the maintainer, or a link to such info.  For the
helloJavaWorld package this is what you get (where I have added a star
after each link):

Hello Java World
Documentation for package ‘helloJavaWorld’ version 0.0-6
User Guides and Package Vignettes

Read overview* or browse directory*.

Help Pages

helloJavaWorld*	Function to say hello from a Java class