[R] problem with rdocdir option when installing R2.3.1

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Christine Krahenbuhl wrote:

> Hi,
>
> In the "R documentation and Administration" manual it is said that "The
> configure or make variables |rdocdir| and |rsharedir| can be used to
> install the system-independent doc and share directories to somewhere
> other than |libdir|".

And indeed it does so.

> Then I've installed R v2.3.1 on a solaris platform (SunOS 5.9)  with the
> following commands :
> > ./configure --prefix=/somewhere/stats  rdocdir=/elsewhere/html
> > make
> > make install
>
> It works well since documentation files are located in in
> /elsewhere/html but when I use the html browser to compulse the

What does `compulse' mean, and what exactly did you do?

> documentation, the links doesn't work.
> In fact, all HREF balise are like "<a href="../../library/package/...">"
> but the library directory is not installed to "../../library" it is
> installed to "/somewhere/stats/R-2.3.1/library".
>
> Is there a parameter that I've missed ?

You are supposed to use help.start() to view the HTML help pages: it makes 
the requisite links to a session-specific directory.  (This is unrelated 
to your subject line: you use help.start() however you installed R.)

-- 
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