[R-SIG-Mac] Help.start() issues

[Simon Urbanek]

On Nov 17, 2003, at 7:03 PM, Stefano Iacus wrote:

> George,
> I don't think you'll be successfull to doing search from the browser  
> (any apart old versions of Netscape apparently).
>
> If you cannot even start safari from RAqua that hte problem comes from  
> the libiconv library which is in your /usr/local/lib.

There is one more pitfall that could be mentioned: R still includes  
/usr/X11R6/lib in DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, which breaks a lot of things,  
beside R packages also any applications that are launched from R,  
including Camino. You will probably want to include something like this  
in one of the startup files (or the shell equivalent if desired):

Sys.putenv("DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH"=sub("/usr/X11R6/ 
lib","",Sys.getenv("DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH")))

But Stefano is right that you're not likely to get the search to work.  
A brief debugging reveals what I suspected:

java.security.AccessControlException: access denied  
(java.io.FilePermission  read)
	at  
java.security.AccessControlContext.checkPermission(AccessControlContext. 
java:270)
	at  
java.security.AccessController.checkPermission(AccessController.java: 
401)
	at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkPermission(SecurityManager.java:542)
	at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkRead(SecurityManager.java:887)
	at java.io.File.exists(File.java:677)
	at sun.net.www.protocol.file.Handler.openConnection(Handler.java:62)
	at java.net.URL.openConnection(URL.java:943)
[...]

It is the old security issue of applets. I've (briefly) seen a lot of  
discussions about this, anyone interested may "google" for it, but  
solutions involve signing the class/jar files and similar approaches.  
Another possibility would be to hard-code the index into the source but  
then it would have to be re-compiled on update etc... I never really  
dealt with this (I used the hard-coded solution or sockets), so it's  
just a guess ;).

BTW: Who is the author of the applet code and has the sources? It's  
hard to debug it when you don't have the source code :P

Cheers,
Simon

---
Simon Urbanek
Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis
Universitätsstr. 14
86135 Augsburg
Germany

Tel: +49-821-598-2236
Fax: +49-821-598-2280

Simon.Urbanek at Math.Uni-Augsburg.de
http://simon.urbanek.info