[Rd] Checking R manual build

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2011, Stephen Ellison wrote:

> Is there a quick way of checking the R manuals built from the .texi 
> files in ../doc/manual without building the rest of R?

What does 'check' mean?

> Going from a vanilla checkout, some included files are missing (eg 
> version.texi) and created by the makefiles, so it looks like the 
> complete make script needs to be run at least once ... and then one 
> has a number of make-generated changes to one's R sources to worry 
> about in any subsequent diff.

You haven't told us your OS (pace the posting guide).  On all systems 
the first step is to run configure (but that has already been done for 
you on Windows, but you do need to create MkRules from MkRules.local). 
Again except on Windows, we recommend working in a build directory 
other than the sources.  Even on Windows there will be *no* 
'make-generated changes to one's R sources': no files are changed but 
some are generated.  make distclean will clean up ..

> Is the only route to export the svn copy, build from the exported 
> copy and then use texinfo to check the manual pages using the 
> make-built includes and rules?

Possibly, depending on the meaning of 'check'.

R-core (as the only people changing these manuals) also need to use a 
pdflatex system, to check that the PDF version can be made as the 
manuals have PDF-specific (and HTML-specific) sections.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595