Using zip format for help pages, examples, etc.

[Prof Brian Ripley]

> From: Jonathan Rougier <J.C.Rougier@durham.ac.uk>
> 
> On Fri, 26 Mar 1999, Martyn Plummer wrote:
> 
> > The problem isn't that the help files take up a lot of space,
> > but that certain file systems are extremely inefficient in
> > the use of that space.
> 
> This is probably an unrealistic suggestion, but if compression is less of
> a problem than the number of files, why not take the help files `onboard'
> by creating a new class of objects with mode "help", which would be lists
> with components much like the current .Rd files, and attach them at the
> bottom of the search list.  Each library would then require just a single
> file of help objects.

But then loading a `package' would take longer and use much more memory,
and memory in R is precious.

We have talked about concatenating the help/R-ex files into a single
file per package, and indexing it, but the zip file route avoids some
of the work and helps with compression too.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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