[R] Trouble with HTML search engine

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Thomas Lumley wrote:

> 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.

Actually, no, as R guarantees you one via tempdir() (not that it is easy,
but we do work on it).  The problem is that users can get at HTML search
without running R, for example directly from an RGui menu or from Windows
Explorer.  If we gave that up we could use a temporary location, provided
we can find a way to refer to it that Java/JavaScript understands in all
browsers and JVMs (and I don't know how to refer to Windows drives
completely portably in file: URLs - file:///C:/R/rw1090 seems the most
commonly accepted form, but one browser used to require : to be replaced
by |).

I don't think this is much of an issue.  Most people using R on Windows 
machines with read-only access don't install any packages.

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595