[R] Defective help pages

[Peter Danenberg]

I'm trying to diagnose a bizarre problem in which the help files
invoked from R are partially defective. help(), for instance, is
missing the Description, Arguments and See Also sections; as are help
files for other commands (see below).

I've built 2.8.1, 2.10.1 and HEAD with the same results; do I need to
set an environment or configuration variable?

  help                   package:utils                   R Documentation

  Documentation

  Description:


  Usage:

       help(topic, package = NULL, lib.loc = NULL,
            verbose = getOption("verbose"),
            try.all.packages = getOption("help.try.all.packages"),
            help_type = getOption("help_type"))

  Arguments:











  Details:

       The following types of help are available:

          * Plain text help






  Offline help:



  Note:



  References:

       Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) _The New S
       Language_.  Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

  See Also:



  Examples:

       help()
       help(help)              # the same

       help(lapply)

       help("for")             # or ?"for", but quotes/backticks are
       needed

       help(package="splines") # get help even when package is not
       loaded

       topi <- "women"
       help(topi)

       try(help("bs", try.all.packages=FALSE)) # reports not found (an
       error)
       help("bs", try.all.packages=TRUE)       # reports can be found
                                               # in package 'splines'