documenting R

[SaranjeetKaur]

This chapter describes how you can help with and contribute to R documentation.

[SaranjeetKaur]

The sections on 'Translating' and 'Instructions for reporting the CRAN policy bugs' will be built after more discussions and inputs.

[llrs]

This was a brief chapter 👍 ! Got a couple of suggestions and I've seen some typos.

[llrs]

So I was asked about sharing my experience fixing errors on CRAN website. Not sure where is a good place a similar paragraph:

If you find some typo or problem on https://cran.r-project.org after checking the problem or typo you can write a polite email to cran-sysadmin@r-project.org and one of the R-core members working with CRAN. You'll probably get a prompt reply about how the issue is going to be fixed.

[SaranjeetKaur]

Thanks @llrs ! We will have this included into the guide! 🌼

[hturner]

This is a good start to a guide on contributing to documentation. I think we should also mention the R manuals (https://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html). These are part of the R sources (https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/tree/master/doc/manual) and hence bug reports/patches can also be submitted via Bugzilla, e.g. https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15221. Note that they are typically referred to by their file names "R-admin", "R-exts" etc. The manuals are written in Texinfo (file extension .texi), which will be unfamiliar to many I think (https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/). The manual should be referred to for how to mark up text (https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/texinfo.html). R-admin contains information on how to build the manuals (https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-admin.html#Making-the-manuals) - it would be a good idea to check the manuals build if you are providing a patch. But simple suggestions could be made by describing the change or providing suggested .texi marked-up text directly, e.g. https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15193.

[SaranjeetKaur]

Hello Everyone, for now, I am merging PRs #7, #8, #17, #18, and #19 to get a clearer high level view of the structure of this Guide. I will be coming back to address the unresolved comments on these 5 pull requests after 24th June 2021. Many thanks to all the Reviewers for their patience!