[R] a couple of minor points about SHLIB

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, Faheem Mitha wrote:

> Dear People,
>
> 1) When I use the R search engine to find SHLIB (the text says "You can
> search for keywords, function and data names and text in help page titles.
> Usage: Enter a string in the text field below and hit RETURN"),
>
> I get "no matches for "SHLIB" have been found!"
>
> On the other hand, when I do
>
> >help(SHLIB)
>
> at the R command line, the help page for SHLIB immediately pops up (having
> already activated browser help with help.start()). Is there some reason
> for this?

SHLIB is in none of

keywords
function and data names  (but it is supposed to look like one of these)
text in help page titles

However, the real issue is that the platform-specific help files are
not being listed in the CONTENTS file used for indexing.  That's a bug
in Rd2contents (or its usage).


> 2) On the online help page and in the document "Writing R Extensions" it
> is recommended to use
>
> R CMD SHLIB foo.c
>
> to create shared libraries to load into R. On the other hand, the Ripley
> and Venables book "S Programming" have on pg 239
>
> R SHLIB foo.c
>
> Both of these work, and seem to work in exactly the same way. If CMD is
> unnecessary, why use it? And what is the meaning of CMD?

The preferred usage has changed since `S Programming' was written (in the
days of 0.91.0, well over a year ago).  One day, R SHLIB may no longer
work.

-- 
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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