R help - Feb 2010 - R help question: How can we enable useRs to contribute corrections to help files faster ?

Hello dear R users,


*Here is the background for my question:*

I just had a look at the help file for
? Yeast
in the "HistData" package.

In it, I found a small spelling mistake where the word
"*c*istribution" was
written instead (so I imagin) "*d*istribution".
I thought maybe I should e-mail the developer. Since there is no link to
contacting the developer inside that help page, I went and googled the
package name. Found it's place on cran (in the third result), where I found
the maintainer to be Michael Friendly <friendly at yorku.ca>  (Whom I am
corresponding to this e-mail).

So it took me three steps to send a tiny typo: search the package on google,
find the maintainer e-mail (where "at" should be changed to
"@"), and
writing an e-mail.
How could this have been faster?

*Proposed solutions:*

One (simple) way, is for the help page to have the maintainer e-mail present
at the bottom of every help page. Where upon clicking the link - an e-mail
will popup with the e-mails subject header containing the package and the
relevant help page title.
Another (more complex, but more scalable) way, is if the help page could
have been also present on some wiki. Inside the help page, there would be a
link to an "edit" section on the online wikipedia (R-help-epidia)-
where I
could have just went and fixed the type.

 What do you think, and who should I propose this to?

Best,
Tal






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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.

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 5:44 AM, Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello dear R users,
>
>
> *Here is the background for my question:*
>
> I just had a look at the help file for
> ? Yeast
> in the "HistData" package.
>
> In it, I found a small spelling mistake where the word
"*c*istribution" was
> written instead (so I imagin) "*d*istribution".
> I thought maybe I should e-mail the developer. Since there is no link to
> contacting the developer inside that help page, I went and googled the
> package name. Found it's place on cran (in the third result), where I
found
> the maintainer to be Michael Friendly <friendly at yorku.ca> ?(Whom I
am
> corresponding to this e-mail).
>
> So it took me three steps to send a tiny typo: search the package on
google,
> find the maintainer e-mail (where "at" should be changed to
"@"), and
> writing an e-mail.
> How could this have been faster?
>
> *Proposed solutions:*
>
> One (simple) way, is for the help page to have the maintainer e-mail
present
> at the bottom of every help page. Where upon clicking the link - an e-mail
> will popup with the e-mails subject header containing the package and the
> relevant help page title.
> Another (more complex, but more scalable) way, is if the help page could
> have been also present on some wiki. Inside the help page, there would be a
> link to an "edit" section on the online wikipedia
(R-help-epidia)- where I
> could have just went and fixed the type.
>
> ?What do you think, and who should I propose this to?
>
> Best,
> Tal
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----------------Contact
> Details:-------------------------------------------------------
> Contact me: Tal.Galili at gmail.com | ?972-52-7275845
> Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
> www.r-statistics.com (English)
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ? ? ? ?[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

On 28/02/2010 2:09 PM, Claudia Beleites wrote:
> What about the short-term solution of having a function
> package.bug.report - along the lines of bug.report?
That has already been added: see the news here:

http://developer.r-project.org/blosxom.cgi/R-devel/NEWS/2009/11/30#n2009-11-30

Duncan Murdoch

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
wrote:
>
> That's a good point. ?Okay, I'll add it (with some sort of addition
to the man page to say how it's intended to be used), and perhaps with some
special casing for base packages.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
If it is being added, could you change the man page attribution from:

\author{
 David Scott <d.scott at auckland.ac.nz> from code on R-help originally
 due to Sharpie <chuck at sharpsteen.net>.
}

To:

\author{
 David Scott <d.scott at auckland.ac.nz> from code on R-help originally
 due to Charlie Sharpsteen <source at sharpsteen.net>.
}

Thanks!

-Charlie