Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
On 14 January 2006 at 12:54, Greg Kochanski wrote:
| Package: r-base
| Severity: minor
|
|
| When you run
| R --gui=Tk
|
| you get a browser window with links,
I don't. I get a simple Tk-implemented clone of the Windows shell. An R
prompt in a terminal, with menus Files, Demos, Packages, Help.
Sorry! You run
R --gui=Tk
then (as you guessed)
help.start()
*then* you get a browser window where all the links are dead,
assuming you haven't installed r-doc-html
I don't understand how you got there.
help.start() starts a webbrowser with links to help, and that would indeed be
impacted by the lack of html docs.
Yep.
| These links are supplied by the Debian
| r-doc-html package, but unless that package
| is required, something should be done about
| the missing help files.
|
| The best solution might be to have
| help.start() look for the documentation
| and change the front page
| (file:///tmp/Rtmp4XUTZq/.R/doc/html/index.html)
| to tell the user that the documentation is
| currently unavailable and where to get it
| (i.e. install the r-doc-html package,
| and/or an internet URL).
That would deviate too much from upstream behaviour. The r-base-core package
clearly suggests to install documentation, among it the r-doc-html package,
so this has the common Debian behaviour.
Well, the existing behaviour is really rough on someone learning the
package. My initial reaction to this problem was
to mutter "What a broken crock of ***!",
and I'm afraid that a lot of users won't get beyond that point.
Apparently, R creates a per-instance temporary directory
that contains symbolic links to the HTML documentation.
If that is the case, the R should be checking that the targets
of the links exist before creating them. Whether or not
you want to do a Debian-specific fix, it is a bug
that R does not check for a missing file before using it.
Really, help.start() should at least check that
.../doc/html/index.html exists, and should produce a good
error message if it doesn't. If that were true, then
you just have to remove .../doc/html/index.html from
the r-base package, and all would work nicely.
An alternative approach for handling this error is
for r-base to supply one version of
<whatever>/doc/html/index.html
and for r-doc-html to supply a different version of that file.
Is there a good way to do that within Debian's package
system?
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