[R] "Missing links": Hmisc and Design docs

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

On 24 Apr 2003 11:43:51 +0200
Peter Dalgaard BSA <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> wrote:

> (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > Using R Version 1.6.2  (2003-01-10)
> > on    SuSE Linux 7.2,
> > I just installed Hmisc_1.5-3.tar.gz and Design_1.1-5.tar.gz
> > These were taken from
> >    http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat/s/library/r
> > 
> > Checked the dependencies:
> > 
> > Hmisc: grid, lattice, mva, acepack -- all already installed
> > 
> > Design: Hmisc, survival -- survival already installed, so
> >         installed Hmisc first
> > 
> > All seems to go well till the "help" docs are compiled,
> > whereupon I get several reports of "missing links", as below
> > (where I omit cases with no such reports). I can't recall
> > seeing "missing links" when installing other libraries.
> > 
> > Two questions:
> > 1. Have I overlooked something here, which I should have done?
> > 2. Do these "missing links" matter?
> > 
> > Or is this simply a manifestation of Frank Harrell's comment, on the
> > above site, that "I still have not had time to fix details in the
> > documentation that will allow R CMD check to be passed, which would
> > allow me to submit the libraries to CRAN."
> 
> In general, you get the missing links if there's a reference to
> something that isn't there. Sometimes, it means that you need to
> install some other package before this one (e.g. with the set of
> recommended packages that ship with R we need to build survival before
> boot), but in Frank's case, I think a fair proportion of them are due
> to S-PLUS references that he hasn't quite ferreted out yet. Certainly,
> trellis and nlminb are S-PLUS items that are not in R (it might
> actually be an idea to have help pages that said "foo is an S-PLUS
> function that is not in R, you probably want to use bar instead";
> anyone want to contribute?)

Peter is correct.  I wish there were a way to give R a file containing a list of function names whose links are to be ignored.  Then when I convert the Rd file for S-Plus I could still have one base source file.  -Frank

---
Frank E Harrell Jr              Prof. of Biostatistics & Statistics
Div. of Biostatistics & Epidem. Dept. of Health Evaluation Sciences
U. Virginia School of Medicine  http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat