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

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 01/07/2019 8:28 p.m., Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 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.

I just saw here:

https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues/4819

that the issue is known and fixed in RStudio, but still only in a 
preview release available here:

https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/preview/

Duncan Murdoch