R devel - Sep 2016 - Fwd: Re: RSiteSearch, sos, rdocumentation.org, ...?

On 8 September 2016 at 06:01, Jonathan Baron wrote:
| We have over 10,000 packages now. I wonder if searching all help files
| is really helpful anymore.

Yes it is. I go to http://rdocumentation.org a lot for quick look-ups.

So thanks to Datacamp for running that.  

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org

I looked at rdocumentation.org. At first I thought it was a superior
replacement for namazu, but after I tried a few things I decided that
it wasn't. I could not find any documentation about how to search, and
the various things I tried seemed to yield very strange responses,
e.g., a search for "Hayes mediation bootstrap" gave me mostly
functions that had nothing to do with the search except for the word
"bootstrap".

So I managed to fix the major Perl module errors (one of which was
quite bothersome although not fatal ... yet). And I figured out a new
way to create the indices that namazu uses; the new way is more
selective. And things seem to work now. Aside from the problems I just
fixed, this is not hard to maintain, so I will continue.

It also seems that someone IS sort of maintaining namazu,
sporadically. There is a Fedora rpm for it. That was how I found out
how to fix the Perl module.

But I did end up spending a few hours on this on a day when I am
behind writing action letters, etc. etc. And ultimately I cannot do
this forever and would love it if someone else took it over, or at
least helped, with an account on my server.

Jon

On 09/08/16 06:36, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>
>On 8 September 2016 at 06:01, Jonathan Baron wrote:
>| We have over 10,000 packages now. I wonder if searching all help files
>| is really helpful anymore.
>
>Yes it is. I go to http://rdocumentation.org a lot for quick look-ups.
>
>So thanks to Datacamp for running that.  
>
>Dirk
>
>-- 
>http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
Editor: Judgment and Decision Making (http://journal.sjdm.org)

Jonathan,

FWIW I mentored a Google Summer of Code student (who was more than highly
self-sufficient and needed next to no help, apart from some small R packaging
tricks) as part of the Xapian project in order to write RXapian:

   https://github.com/amandaJayanetti/RXapian

which is an R interface to the Xapian index engine.

I don't know much about these indice generators, but Xapian [1] appears to
be
free, open-source, current, maintained, powerful, and used.  From what I
gather you are still betting on an older (and as I seem to recall,
deprecated) technology. There may be more teers ahead.

The other tip would be to get in touch with Gabor who as part of r-hub has
indices for just about anything, and 9as he his a generation younger than
Spencer, you or me) also provides current (ie JSON over REST) interfaces.

Dirk

[1] https://xapian.org/

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org