[R] help pages not install lead to termination of R

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Tue, 18 May 1999, Mai Zhou wrote:

> I installed rw0641 from the binary rw0641b.zip
> but not the help files (not rw0641h, not rw0641w ). 
>
> Now when I start Rgui, and do > ?ls
> causes R to crash, instead of reporting "help page not found".
> 
> Is there something I need to edit so that R will not crash when
> no help pages are found? (Rprofile?)

The help pages are not optional: you must install them. There is no
protection (nor in the Unix version) against blatently ignoring the
instructions: as the rw-FAQ says

  1.1) Where can I find the latest version?

  Go to any CRAN site (see http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/R/mirrors.html for a
  list), navigate to the bin/windows/windows-NT/base directory and collect
  the files you need. You will need at least the files

      rw06xxb.zip rw06xxh.zip

I don't understand why if you are so clever as not to need the help pages
you could not work this out for yourself!  It is not the help pages that
are not found, but the indices, and they are _essential_.  If you randomly
remove parts of the R installation, it will indeed crash.

-- 
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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