[ESS-bugs] ess-mode 5.2.7; cannot get help for contour()

[Stephen Eglen]

Sebastian Luque writes:
 > On Fri, 3 Jun 2005 17:36:50 +0100,
 > Stephen Eglen <S.J.Eglen at damtp.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
 > >
 > > I would suggest deleting all customization of comint variables in your
 > > .emacs - and seeing if that works.  i.e. remove
 > >
 > >> setq comint-output-filter-functions
 > 
 > Ok, I had a chance to go over this tonight and found that
 > ess-help-kill-bogus-buffers was causing my problems. I had it set to t at
 > some point just to try. Once I removed this customization (the variable is
 > nil by default), help works normally.

i took a look at this again.  A quick trace found the problem.  In the
help file for contour, you can see the following lines of text:

     There is currently no documentation about the algorithm. The
     source code is in '$R_HOME/src/main/plot3d.c'.

and the magic words "no documentation" then cause
ess-help-bogus-buffer-p to return the buffer position of that text! My
first thought then was to restrict the search to the first few hundred
characters of text.  Much to my surprise, the defun already has this
argumnet NR-FIRST, but the code has:

		   ;; search in first nr-first (default 120) chars only
		   (and nil (if (not nr-first) (setq nr-first 120)))

so nr-first, even when set to nil, stays as nil because of that
(and nil ...) at the start of the line.  anyone know why that code has
effectively been commented out?  It doesn't look like a recent change
- the most recent relevant log entry seems to be:

r1875 | maechler | 2002-01-10 17:23:49 +0000 (Thu, 10 Jan 2002) | 2 lines
ess-help-bogous-..buffer  fix

So, shall we just put that code back in, but maybe increase the
default (and document it in the doc string) to be something like 300
characters in case there was a worry that 120 was not far enough to
look?

Presumably the other pages that Sebastian found the error with is when
similar text "no documentation" is found in other manual pages.

Thanks, Stephen