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

Suzen, Mehmet
Tue, 30 Jan 2018 22:32:38 -0000

Dear All,

Thank you for all valuable input and sorry for the off-topic for the
list. I will try R-pkg-devel for further related questions.   I was
actually after "one-go" auto-documentation in-line or out of comments
from a single file/environment in a similar spirit to
'package.skeleton or an extension of it. My take-home message or
summary from all responses do far.

* Regarding documentation;Duncan Murdoch's  wisdom "...to get good
stuff in the help page, you need just as much work as in writing the
.Rd file directly..". So there is no silver bullet in terms of
auto-documentation, I gather, especially for considering if one uses
more complex constructs, S4/S6 classes or Rcpp code behind.On the
other hand, roxgen2 being the most comprehensive solution.

* Lightweight solution to try out before moving to RStudio fully. I
will give a try Dirk's 'pkgKitten' and 'inlinedocs' Malcolm
mentioned.

Interestingly, responses have reminded me Larry Wall's quote
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_to_do_it),
which I think really applies to R more than any language I encounter
so far, from different class systems to different time-series
representations, so richly democratised.

Many regards,
Mehmet


On 30 January 2018 at 17:00, Suzen, Mehmet <mehmet.suzen at gmail.com>
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?
>
> Many thanks,
> Mehmet