[R] [stats-rosuda-devel] Problem with JGR. Was: Re: Using help()

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jan 25, 2009, at 9:35 , Michael Kubovy wrote:

> Dear Friends,
>
> Thanks to Rolf Turner, Brian Ripley and Patrick Burns for their  
> answers.They don't quite resolve the problem, which I now realize is  
> due to non-standard behavior of JGR, at least on my machine (I  
> verified that Mac GUI works entirely as expected):
>
> **** My installation********************
> Running the JGR GUI:
> > sessionInfo()
> R version 2.8.1 (2008-12-22)
> i386-apple-darwin8.11.1
>
> locale:
> C/C/en_US/C/C/C
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets   
> methods
> [8] base
>
> other attached packages:
> [1] JGR_1.6-2       iplots_1.1-2    JavaGD_0.5-2    rJava_0.6-1
> [5] MASS_7.2-45     lattice_0.17-20
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] tools_2.8.1
>
> ********What happens with "?" and "??" **************
>

"?" is interpreted by JGR (re-mapped to internal call to help followed  
by help.search if no topics were found) instead of R. So JGR is  
smarter than R used to be, but that has changed in R 2.8.  
Unfortunately R has currently no publicly available API to support  
what the Mac-GUI does, because it uses a nasty trick by modifying R's  
sources to hook inside R. I'm working on fixing this for R 2.9.0-to- 
be, but currently JGR is out of luck and has to rely on its own  
attempts to parse the command line, so the results will vary until then.


> If I type "?normal" I get the long list, not "No documentation  
> found." When I type "?plot" I get the help page for plot {JM}, and  
> not plot.default {graphics}; when I type ?dnorm I get a rather long  
> list of help pages.
>
> If I type "??normal"
> I get
> ?normal.htm
> .com.symantec.APSock
> .com.symantec.aptmp
> .DM_1039:1232634821l:DlnIrq
> .DM_11869:1232818209l:m4AGyL
> .DM_13345:1232655220l:C1js39
> .DM_14309:1232822090l:e6wvqw
> .DM_15688:1232659145l:ffZvPg
> .DM_16640:1232825979l:n5TrAz
> .DM_18040:1232662823l:Gb81yX
> …
>
> ******** Another JGR problem **************
>
> Help pages for newly installed packages are accessible only after  
> JGR is restarted.
>

I can see what could cause that, but in theory that should affect all  
html-based systems if R really doesn't update the links. I didn't  
actually look but it's possible that JGR just needs to call  
make.packages.html() -- in effect, try calling that function and if  
that solves your problem that's what's it is ...


Cheers,
S


> Thanks,
> MK
>
> On Jan 24, 2009, at 8:54 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
>>
>> On 25/01/2009, at 2:33 PM, Michael Kubovy wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> …
>>> (1) If I type ?normal because I forgot the name dnorm() I get a long
>>> list of relevant pages. Getting to right page is laborious.
>>>
>>> (2) If I remember dnorm() and want to be reminded of the call, I  
>>> also
>>> get a list of pages.
>>> …
>>>
>>
>> …
>> If you type ``?normal'' you get a ``No documentation found'' message.
>>
>> If you type ``??normal'' you indeed get a long list of pages, some of
>> which might be relevant.  (If you want help on ``dnorm'' then the  
>> relevant
>> page is stats::Normal.  And then typing ``?Normal'' gets you what you
>> want.  Which is somewhat on the obscure side of obvious, IMHO.)
>>
>> If you type ``?dnorm'' then you get exactly what you want  
>> immediately.
>> Exactly?  Well, there's also info on pnorm, qnorm, and rnorm, but I
>> expect you can live with that.
>>
>> …
>> 		Rolf Turner
>
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