visual map of all functions in a package

[baptiste]

Aim

Facilitate the understanding of complex packages with a visual overview of all the functions present in a package. Inspiration can be drawn from foodweb in the mcbutils package and graphviz (visualise dependencies between functions in graph from).

Technical considerations

• arranging different pieces together could be automated using two kinds of meta-information: @family from roxygen2, and the network of dependencies (e.g using mvbutils::foodweb). A given family of pieces could be layout in a column, while inter-dependencies could be indicated by a common colour scheme, for example.
• there could be special markers (e.g a small asterisc) to indicate functions that are not exported.
• there should be a function that returns a grob describing a given function (with optional color and asterisk arguments). This grob would have widthDetails etc. methods so that it can be placed easily on a page.
• the gridSvg package could be used to animate the output interactively; for example highlighting dependencies on mouse-over, showing the function description as a tool-tip, etc.

[baptiste]

either R graphics (grid) or tikz could be considered for this task.

[baptiste]

Paul Murrell did some work in the direction of drawing with Grid,

http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/gridgraph/ (using graphviz) http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/R/Diagram

[hadley]

This is a good idea, but now I think it's outside the scope of devtools.