On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 02:03:51PM -0400, Duncan Murdoch wrote: > On 10/5/2009 1:50 PM, Charles Geyer wrote: > >The functions metrop and temper in the mcmc package have a debug = FALSE > >argument that when TRUE adds a lot of debugging information to the returned > >list. This is absolutely necessary to test the functions, because one > >generally knows nothing about the simulated distribution except what what > >one learns from MCMC samples. Hence you must expose all details of the > >simulation to have any hope of checking that it is doing what it is > >supposed > >to do. However, this information is of interested mostly (perhaps solely) > >to developers. So I didn't document it in the Rd files for these > >functions. > > > >But it has ocurred to me that people might be interested in how these > >functions > >are validated, and I would like to document the debug output somewhere, > >but I > >don't want to clutter up the documentation that ordinary users see. That > >suggests a separate help page for debugging. Looking at "Writing R > >Extensions" > >it doesn't seem like there is a type of Rd file for this purpose. I > >suppose > >it could be added in (fairly long) sections titled "Debug Output" in > >metrop.Rd > >and temper.Rd or it could be put in a package help page (although that's > >not > >what that kind of page is really for). Any other possibilities to > >consider? > > I think writing it up in a vignette would probably be most appropriate. > You can link directly to a vignette from a man page (though not, > unfortunately, vice versa). For example, if you look at > package?grid, you'll see a list that was generated by this code: > > Further information is available in the following > \link{vignettes}: > \tabular{ll}{ > \code{grid} \tab Introduction to \code{grid} (\url{../doc/grid.pdf})\cr > \code{displaylist} \tab Display Lists in \code{grid} > (\url{../doc/displaylist.pdf})\cr
So I decided to follow your advice mcmc_0.7-3.tar.gz just uploaded to CRAN has such a vignette and such links in the appropriate Rd files. Thanks -- Charles Geyer Professor, School of Statistics University of Minnesota char...@stat.umn.edu ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel