Helping CRAN to provide html manuals

[llrs]

Currently CRAN serves the manual pages from all packages on the form of https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/<pkg>/<pkg>.pdf.
Additionally there are html versions of served from https://search.r-project.org/CRAN/refmans/<pkg>/html/00Index.html. For example, https://search.r-project.org/CRAN/refmans/BaseSet/html/00Index.html

Desired

CRAN wants to serve a manual page for each package in html format using the function pkg2HTML (introduced in R-4.4).

This would make help pages more accessible to all users and searchable from the internet (SEO, SEM, ...).

Problems

Current problems for this change are:

• Many packages have references that could be from several CRAN packages.
• There aren't (yet) Bioconductor manual pages in html form to link to.
• Checking pkg2HTML before R-4.4 release would help too (in Firefox 124 the <li><p> tags causes some spacing problems)
  

Proposal

The working group may wish to consider helping to take this work forward.

[hturner]

This has been added as an issue for R Dev Day @ PLUS, that will take place the day after useR! (Friday July 12 2024).

[llrs]

Thanks for commenting Heather. I didn't expect this was a candidate for the R dev day and I was about to ask an email to several people involved.

For completeness, after opening this issue and talking a bit with several key people: I created a repository at https://github.com/r-devel/repos for coordinating with Bioconductor (and any other repository) about several process related to the currently supported R repositories.
I'll continue conversations about the HTML refman page in the other repo.