[R] Trouble with HTML search engine

[Thomas Lumley]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Damon Wischik wrote:
> There are obviously things I don't understand about the current help
> setup. If anyone is sufficiently interested in this to explain them to me,
> I would be grateful. (1) On my Windows XP setup, R writes an index in the
> directory it was installed. What if it doesn't have write permission?

Then the index doesn't get updated.  It is very difficult to come up with
a directory that is known to be writable under Windows.

>  (2)
> On my Debian setup, R copies all of the HTML help into a temporary
> directory. Why not just refer to the files where they are, rather than
> copying them all across?

It actually doesn't copy.  It makes symbolic links for most of it, so the
operating system is just referring to the files where they are.  It is
necessary to modify the index to allow for HTML help for installed
packages (the limitation you noted for Windows), and it is simplest to
link the HTML files to the same directory to allow relative paths to work.


	-thomas