[rkward-devel] Downloadable plugins

[Prasenjit Kapat]

Hi

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Thomas Friedrichsmeier
<thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wednesday 06 October 2010, meik michalke wrote:
>> i've just commited the first steps towards a working R package. it doesn't
>> really work yet, but it's close ;-) i've placed it under
>> rkward/rbackend/rpackages/rkwardtests.
>
> Alright. I've arranged for it to be installed with make install.
>
>> i found roxygen to be pretty cool for documenting a package, keeping
>> NAMESPACE up to date etc. unfortunately, you need it as a dependecy
>> (though not loaded for a package). it could probably be stripped from the
>> package afterwards.
>
> Yes, this looks like a very nice way of creating documentation, indeed. But in
> fact, we should not bring that dependency into the release (otherwise, the
> rkwardtests-package will not even install, unless the user already has roxygen
> installed).

Yes, that is a nice style: similar to how Matlab provides
documentation at the beginning of their .m files.

> What exactly do you need to do in order to generate the .Rd pages? Perhaps we
> could come up with a nifty script that adds the roxygen-dependency, generates
> the man pages, and removes the roxygen-dependency, again. We could then add
> that to scripts/makedist.sh.

One thing we have to be careful is that "make" / "make install" should
work even without an internet connection. (Or is it safe to assume
that wherever / whoever is installing RKWard has access to the
internet?)

>> for the package, i split the original framework R file into one long file
>> with stuff that is used internally only (and not documented), and one R
>> file for each class, method or function that needs to be exported. the
>> latter already have basic documentation in roxygen style. perhaps you
>> could check if i made the right decisions on that behalf so far.
>
> I've only taken a cursory look, but seems good to me.

I haven't looked, but AFAIK, we do not have a NAMESPACE for rkward
package, right? So, there is no issue of "export"ing. But I would like
to have a namepsace and export only those functions which are in
public*.R.

Regards,
-- 
Prasenjit