R INSTALL doc woes

[Paul Gilbert]

>The html documentation currently does not support non-standard
>library locations, i.e., the packages must be in $RHOME library. Of
>course I consider this as a massive bug, but upon fixing it I want tomake it
>completely right ... which includes building the packages.html
>file at runtime from the current .lib.loc. The main problem is that
>there seems to be no way of using environment variables such as $USER
>or $HOME in html code ... hence I cannot access any file the user is
>allowed to write to.

If you consider the possibility that a package may not belong to the owner of R
then you rule out a lot of ways for doing this. One possibility might be a set
of links in /tmp (e.g  R.packages and R.package.xxx ). I don't think you could
write these with HTML, you would need to do that with the R startup script, but
an HTML browser can certainly follow them. There is, however, the problem you
alluded to: one user might clobber another one. As far as I know the only
"official HTML" way around this is with cookies, which I don't know much about
and I'm not sure how you would do it.

Paul Gilbert

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