[R] sd in aggregate and help.search/?? seem not to work as usual in latest version

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 01/07/2019 5:41 a.m., Marvin Kiene wrote:

> Additionally, the 'help.search()' always just gives the result: "No results
> found", for all of my students.

Those students are probably using RStudio.  This appears to be an 
incompatibility in the RStudio browser to a nearly unannounced (as far 
as I can see) change in the help system.  You can read about the change 
in the comments around line 700 of

https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/utils/R/help.search.R

Perhaps if anyone from RStudio is reading this, they can read those 
comments and fix things in their front end.

To work around it, students can set

options(browser="/path/to/their/browser")

where that path will depend on what system they're using.  On MacOS, 
options(browser="/usr/bin/open") works.  On Windows, 
options(browser=NULL) works.  I don't know the R default on Linux.

This will cause lots of things to appear in an external browser instead 
of in the RStudio display, so it's not the nicest workaround, but at 
least it's fairly easy.

Duncan Murdoch