[ESS] no S4 help under Windows XP

[Ross Boylan]

On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 22:32 +0100, Stephen Eglen wrote:
> > I installed Goulet's package awhile ago, and am running ESS 5.3.10,
> > emacs 22.3.1 and R 2.8.1.  I started an R session with M-X R.  I don't
> > think I've made any customizations to R/ESS.
> > 
> > ?setClass
> > or 
> > ?Classes
> > gets me an empty buffer *help[R](setClass)*.
> > 
> > Could anyone suggest a solution or diagnosis?  (Well, other than my
> > short-term fix of working in Linux--the data I'll need is on Windows and
> > needs to stay there).
> 
> hi Ross, can I just confirm -- you find that
> 
> ?setClass
> 
> works on linux
> 
> but not on windows?
Correct.
> 
> Does life get any easier if you add:
> 
> (setq inferior-ess-r-help-command "help(\"%s\", htmlhelp=TRUE)\n")
No.  It doesn't get any harder either: the help that worked before still
works after the change.

I verified that the settings in my .emacs files are being read in; I
wasn't entirely sure where emacs thought home was under Windows.

> 
> to your .emacs which should then start help windows in a web browser?
The thing that starts doesn't look like a web browser, though it
probably is underneath.  It's the standard MS Windows help window, with
tabs for contents, index, and search.

I looked under the installation of R.
doc\html\search\index.txt has
Entry: setClass
Aliases: setClass
Keywords: programming classes methods
Description: Create a Class Definition
URL: ../../../library/methods/html/setClass.html

and that last file exists and the contents look fine.

Ross