[R] INSTALL html help (and vignettes) only?

[Jonathan Baron]

For maintaining my R search page at http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu (also
used for RSiteSearch(), I have been extracting only the html help
pages and the vignettes from most packages.  (Many will not compile on
Linux.  And, more generally, this saves wear and tear on the computer
and me.)

I wrote a version of the old INSTALL script that does this.  I removed
various parts of it, not fully understanding what I was doing, but it
worked.  Now my version does not work anymore.  The entire
installation script seems to have changed in the new version of R, and
some of the external scripts that I used are no longer available (such
as dcf.sh, but there may be others).

I could probably fix this by getting an older version of R and
grabbing what I need.  But perhaps someone just happens to understand
the new INSTALL script well enough to tell me what to do.  By "INSTALL
script" I mean what comes out when I say:
> sink("INSTALL")
> tools:::.install_packages
> sink()
as this seems to be what is called now by R CMD INSTALL.

Another way to do it might be to unzip the package and remove all the
files that might need to be compiled, and then run INSTALL as it is,
but I'm not sure how to do this either, and I'm not sure it would
work.

I also played around with unzipping the package and then extracting
ONLY the html help pages and vignettes.  I could not get that to work
for the html help (although it does work for the vignettes).  Maybe I
should try again.  That's the logically best way, but I don't know how
to do it so that it works.

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron