[Rd] Best practices in developing package: From a single file

Brian G. Peterson
Tue, 30 Jan 2018 16:29:02 -0000

On Tue, 2018-01-30 at 17:00 +0100, Suzen, Mehmet wrote:
> Dear R developers,
>
> I am wondering what are the best practices for developing an R
> package. I am aware of Hadley Wickham's best practice
> documentation/book (http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/).??I recall a couple of
> years ago there were some tools for generating a package out of a
> single file, such as using package.skeleton, but no auto-generated
> documentation. Do you know a way to generate documentation and a
> package out of single R source file, or from an environment?

Mehmet,

This list is for development of the R language itself and closely
related tools.  There is a separate list, R-pkg-devel, for development
of packages.

Since you're here, I'll try to answer your question.

package.skeleton can create a package from all the R functions in a
specified environment.  So if you load all the functions that you want
in your new package into your R environment, then call
package.skeleton, you'll have a starting point.

At that point, I would probably recommend moving to RStudio, and using
RStudio to generate markdown comments for roxygen for all your newly
created function files.  Then you could finish off the documentation by
writing it in these roxygen skeletons or copying and pasting from
comments in your original code files.

Please address further discussion to the R-pkg-devel list.

Regards,

Brian