[R-sig-Fedora] R.css missing in Fedora R-core rpm

[Iñaki Ucar]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 23:55, Jeroen Ooms <jeroenooms using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 2:27 PM Iñaki Ucar <iucar using fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 13:26, Jeroen Ooms <jeroenooms using gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > When installing an R package from source on Fedora using the standard
> > > R-core rpm, we always get a warning at the end because of a missing
> > > css file /usr/share/doc/R/html/R.css:
> > >
> > > ** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
> > > ** help
> > > *** installing help indices
> > > Error in file.copy(file.path(R.home("doc"), "html", "R.css"), outman) :
> > >   (converted from warning) problem copying /usr/share/doc/R/html/R.css
> > > to /usr/lib64/R/library/00LOCK-systemfonts/00new/systemfonts/html/R.css:
> > > No such file or directory
> > >
> > > But when I try to install the missing file, yum says it is already installed:
> > >
> > >   yum install /usr/share/doc/R/html/R.css
> > >   ## Package R-core-4.0.3-1.fc32.x86_64 is already installed.
> > >
> > > However it does not actually exist. Perhaps the rpm could make a copy
> > > or symlink from /usr/lib64/R/library/base/html/R.css
> >
> > I assume you are doing this in a docker image. That file is not
> > installed because our base images have "tsflags=nodocs" set in
> > /etc/dnf/dnf.conf. Unset this before installing R-core, or, even
> > better, install packages with --no-docs.
>
> Perhaps --no-docs should then be the default if tsflags=nodocs? The
> default behavior is unfortunate, because it makes install.packages()
> fail even if the user is not even interested in documentation, and
> people come up with all sorts of workarounds eg:
> https://github.com/r-lib/devtools/issues/2084

install.packages doesn't fail. devtools does. I see:

Warning in file.create(f.tg) :
 cannot create file '/usr/share/doc/R/html/packages.html', reason 'No
such file or directory'
Warning in utils::make.packages.html(.Library, docdir = R.home("doc")) :
 cannot update HTML package index

The package is correctly installed and usable.

> Alternatively, perhaps it makes sense to consider the file
> /usr/share/doc/R/html/R.css to be not part of the documentation,
> because R assumes this file to be available during install.packages().
> Exactly the same R.css file is also included in every installed
> package under html/R.css, even when tsflags=nodocs, so I don't see the
> point of omitting it in the once place where R expects to find it.

-- 
Iñaki Úcar