Include package/function documentation in the DB ?

[moodymudskipper]

From your own words :

The CRAN database provides an API for programatically accessing all meta-data of CRAN R packages.

Can we consider documentation as meta data ? And if so could we include it in your database ?

The beauty of the R language comes in good part from the fact that most things are transparent, structured, and accessible. The doc seems to be an exception to this rule and is generally a mess to deal with for ad hoc tasks such as lookup up a word or regex, or extracting sections, parameter lists etc...

Meta CRAN makes an excellent job of centralizing all the doc and makes it easily accessible. How nice would it be to leverage your database to be able to finally easily access the structure of the doc ?

Some use cases :

• query the DB for keywords on argument descriptions only
• find all the functions that refered a given function in @Seealso
• fetch the different definitions of an argument, in order not to reinvent the wheel and contribute to make help files more consistent
• fetch easily descriptions or functions and parameters to make sure we don't use a keyword that has a specific meaning in a given field
• general text mining to spot trends and clusters in the way packages are documented (for instance to be informed of the way people usually actually do things before setting conventions)
• Quantify the need for tools helping people make better doc

I posted a version of this request on datacamp/rdocumentation-app#424 a while ago and it wasn't closed but wasn't acted upon either. I figured you might see the value in this ?

Many thanks for the great work I'm always impressed by the quality and quantity of your output.

[gaborcsardi]

We'll do this long term, but it does require a much bigger DB, and much bigger machine.