[ESS] help in R 2.10 Windows

[Martin Maechler]

Hi Ross
(and everyone else).

In the "development version" of ESS (in 'svn' / subversion)
I have committed changes that should fix this problem persistently.
I'd be glad if you could try out the new (unreleased) version of ESS
and confirm that my changes fix the problem.
You can get the Windows-zip file
  ftp://stat.ethz.ch/U/maechler/ESS/ess-5.6.zip
which you need to unpack at the appropriate place,
or possibly only use its ./lisp/ subdirectory instead of the installed
./ess/ one..

Best regards,
Martin Maechler

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 22:08, Ross Boylan <ross at biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-11-02 at 12:40 -0800, Ross Boylan wrote:
>> I'm using R 2.10 on Windows XP with ESS 5.5.
>>
>> Since the previous discussion indicates startup scripts are problematic
>> for setting help, I set inferior-ess-help-command to "help(\"%s\",
>> help_type=\"text\")".
>>
>> After this, when I use ? the system hangs until I do ctl-g.  When I then
>> do ctl-c ctl-c the help text prints out in the main *R* buffer.
>>
>> I wanted text mostly because it took too long to get the help into the
>> browser (MSIE), even after the browser was opened.
>>
>> Then I changed the help command to
>>  "help(\"%s\", help_type=\"html\")",
>> hoping at least to avoid the "htmlhelp is deprecated" warnings that
>> appeared as if they were regular ess help buffers.
>>
>> However, I still have to type at least ctl-g and enter to get the help
>> to appear in the browser.
>>
> And then I noticed that the original strings had \n at the end.  By
> adding that, the first variant works (help inside of Emacs in a separate
> buffer).  If I get help on a command I already got htmlhelp for I see
> the old text buffer; ordinarily that would be the right thing to do.  In
> my case I see
> Warning message:
> In help("intervals", htmlhelp = TRUE) :
>  htmhelp = TRUE is deprecated: use help_type ="html"
> Killing the old buffer cleans things up.
>
> That still leaves the problem of how to make the setting persistent so I
> don't need to set the variable each session.  I'm not sure if the
> previous thread on help implies I can set something in .Rprofile or not.
>
> Ross
>
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