[R] html help for packages with MS Windows

[Prof Brian Ripley]

> From: Jim Lindsey <jlindsey at alpha.luc.ac.be>
> Subject: [R] html help for packages with MS Windows
> 
> In the past few days, I have been helping people from Ethiopia and
> from Kenya to get started with R. We have discovered that properly
> installed libraries (survival5 or mine) work and the online (with ?)
> help is available but they do not appear in the html help (under
> packages) with MS Windows. Only the libraries supplied with R appear
> there. This is not true with netscape under (Linux) X-Windows where
> all installed libraries are listed.

(AFAIK only if you built them from source, and have perl5 installed.
That is true of Windows too. I assume you are installing pre-compiled
packages.)

>   We have used the standard installer that comes with R0.65.1. What
> are we doing wrong?

Item 2.3 in the rw-FAQ says:


   2.3) The packages I installed do not appear in the HTML help system.
   
   HTML help only works for packages installed in rw0xxx\library.
   
   To update the HTML help files after you
   have installed a binary package, run at the R prompt.
   
	 > link.html.help()
   
   (The source-code installation does this automatically, and
   if you have that installed you can use (preferably)
   
	 cd rw0xxx\src\gnuwin32\help
	 make indices
   
   instead.)


and the README says


   Adding packages
   ===============
   
   Binaries for many packages are available at
   CRAN/bin/windows/windows-NT/contrib. These are zip files which should
   be unpacked in rw0900\library. They are then available for use. You
   can also use the installer rwinst.exe to selectively unpack the zip
   files.
   
   The list of packages and functions given by HTML help and used by the
   search engine can be updated from a running R process by the command
   
	   link.html.help()


Is that the answer?


> PS It would be nice if the installer knew exactly where to put
> libraries within an R tree instead of having to specify the library
> directory.

On many installations the user will not have write permission on the R
library directory, nor can the installer know which of several
installations of R you want to use.  I could not see a good way to
resolve this.  We could make the installer see if you specified
.../rwxxxx and add /library.  Would that help?


Brian

-- 
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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