Gitignore man directory of an R package?

Question

Because each and every file in the man/ directory of an R package is automatically written with package roxygen2 , I wonder what would prevent me from adding the entire directory to my .gitignore .

In other words, why all R packages on GitHub still version the man/ directory?

Answer 1

As a convenience to users who use devtools::install_github() .

If man/*.Rd is not in the repo, they will get a note like No man pages found in package... upon install and later, help(...) or ?... or ??... will fail for your users with No documentation or No results found .

Answer 2

If you want the man directory to be present but not the files generated in it, place a .gitignore file in the man directory. This will force git to generate the directory, but still ignore the files generated.