This is all based on a false premise: that a partial install of Debian files is 'R'.
R's own scripts do always install the HTML documentation, so help.start() is entitled to assume that it is present. (That is under Unix-alikes: R for Windows allows Compiled HTML rather than HTML, and so help.start makes appropriate tests). Note that your version of 'R' is not current. If there is a bug here, it is in the Debian re-packaging. I trust the Debian packages do contain a bug reporting address other than this one: please use the correct one. (The other binary distributions that I am aware of, e.g. RPMs, do seem to include all of R.) On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Full_Name: Greg Kochanski > Version: 2.2.0 > OS: Debian Linux on i686 > Submission from: (NULL) (212.159.16.190) > > > Debian packages the R documentation separately from the R core code. > Consequently, it is possible for people to have R without > the HTML documentation. (In fact, the docs are not installed by default, > so it's very likely.) > > > Thus, help.start() cannot depend on the HTML documentation being there. > It should check for one (or a few) files and produce some reasonable > error message if it is not there. Maybe something like > "Warning: the HTML documentation is not installed." > > Alternatively, help.start() could produce references to some on-line > HTML documentation, instead of local documentation. > > > > A related bug is that if one calls > help.start() when the HTML documentation does not exist, > all future calls to help() will lead to errors. Working as documented is not a bug. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
