[R] installing ONLY the documentation files (Rd) for many packages?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2010, Kjetil Halvorsen wrote:

> I have been searching the documentation for some time nmow, but 
> cannot find it. It must be possible to download packages (many), but 
> only install the help system?

I am not sure what you actally want: R CMD INSTALL does not install 
the Rd files -- it installs a database of parsed Rd files.

All things are possible in a programming language, but you would need 
to study the R code of INSTALL to see what to extract.  One 
possibility would be to run a loop of calls to  R CMD Rdconv to 
install HTML versions of help (which some people have asked for in the 
past).

However, disk space is cheap, and I would simply install the packages 
and discard the parts you don't want.

-- 
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