[R] Add documentation website (pkgdown)

[asfimport]

pkgdown (https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/) is the standard for R package documentation websites. Build this for arrow and deploy it at https://arrow.apache.org/docs/r.

Reporter: Neal Richardson / @nealrichardson
Assignee: Neal Richardson / @nealrichardson

PRs and other links:

• GitHub Pull Request #4419

_{Note: This issue was originally created as ARROW-5452. Please see the migration documentation for further details.}

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Uwe Korn / @xhochy:
Not sure this is the best way to go. We merged some months ago the C++ and Python documentation as there was a quite an overlap between them and it is forseeable that there will also be a lot of overlap between R, C++ and Python. While using the typical setup for each language may make it easier for contributors to contribute intially to the documentation, it will be harder for Arrow users to navigate across all documentations for specific content. 

 

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Wes McKinney / @wesm:
I agree with @xhochy on this – if it is possible to use the main Sphinx docs project that would be ideal. If there is a need to use RMarkdown we may be able to develop some scripts that process Rmd and include the generated .md files using recommonmark

https://github.com/rtfd/recommonmark

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Neal Richardson / @nealrichardson:
If only .Rmd was the documentation format that R used. R man pages are .Rd format, which is a flavor of TeX. I can't imagine that it's worth our trouble to reimplement everything that pkgdown does to parse those and crossreference across those and various other (mostly markdown) pages. Plus, the pkgdown site style is familiar to R users, just as sphinx is for Python users. It's better for the intended audience of the docs. 

https://arrow.apache.org/docs/js/ and https://arrow.apache.org/docs/java/ already exist, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to add R to that. We can (and should) have links to those other languages in the sphinx /docs/ ToC sidebar.

 

[asfimport]

Wes McKinney / @wesm:
Yeah, for generated API docs that is fine, if we start writing prose documentation for R we should consider doing it in a common place

[asfimport]

Romain Francois / @romainfrancois:
Issue resolved by pull request 4419
#4419