Record use of @inheritDotParams to allow more robust autocompletion in RStudio

[orgadish]

rstudio/rstudio#17149 implements RStudio autocompletion for params inherited via @inheritDotParams.

Since there is no indication that @inheritDotParams was used, the implementation currently traverses the Rd and looks for the structure defined in

roxygen2/R/rd-inherit.R

Lines 281 to 290 in 93b8778

	rd <- paste0(
	"\n",
	" Arguments passed on to ",
	from,
	"\n",
	" \\describe{\n",
	args,
	"\n",
	" }"
	)

.

This makes it very brittle and sensitive to changes in formatting (though workable). It would be great if instead the use of inheritDotParams was recorded more directly.

Per @kevinushey's suggestion on the PR

I could imagine something like a .ROXYGEN2. environment in the package's namespace that stores roxygen2 metadata of this form.

[hadley]

I'd rather tackle this some other way, not based on roxygen2.

[orgadish]

@hadley @kevinushey Now that we've completed the work to support auto-complete for @inheritDotParams in Rstudio (via rstudio/rstudio#17149 and other follow on PRs), I've started thinking about what kind of effort would be needed to make this also work in Positron or VSCode, etc, and I think one of the major hurdles is having to recreate from scratch the very bespoke Rd parsing that I implemented.

I think it could be helpful if there was a more programmatic API to extract that information (e.g. a roclet storing this metadata, or some other mechanism). If not in roxygen2, what do you think would be the best place/way to try and tackle this?

[kevinushey]

I think roxygen2 is the right place to do this; I'm not sure what alternative Hadley has in mind.