[R-SIG-Mac] R 3.2.0 Mavericks/Yosemite: help.search showing error

[David Winsemius]

> On Jun 14, 2015, at 8:18 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Jun 13, 2015, at 11:04 PM, Berend Hasselman wrote:
> 
>> 
>>> On 14-06-2015, at 06:25, Ramnik Bansal <ramnik.bansal at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Thanks. But it seems to be an R 3.2.0 specific problem.
>>> 
>> 
>> I replied with the following to a similar message on R-devel.
> 
> There was no error either with using help() or using the Mac GUI package manager. Those were the reported difficulties previously reported.
> 
>> 
>> ————————————————————————
>> See this thread on R-SIG-Mac
>> 
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2015-April/011420.html
>> 
>> This may help.
>> Get R 3.2.0-patched or even the release candidate for R 3.2.1
>> ————————————————————————
> 
> The error I am getting was from the most recent R 3.2.0 downloaded yesterday. There is no 3.2.0-Patched for Mavericks.  The release candidate, R 3.2.1 RC, is marked on the ATT Research webpage as failing Make and it indeed fails to launch. I would NOT recommend that anyone accept that advice. 
> 
> But maybe it is a Mac-specific problem. When I remove the crippled R 3.2.1 RC and reinstall the R 3.2.0 and run from a Terminal window I do not get the help.search() error. So copying to R SIG Mac, and will not copy R-help on any further efforts.

Posting the session Info when running in the GUI

> help.search("linear models")
Error in help(db[i, "topic"], package = db[i, "Package"], lib.loc = lib,  : 
  'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.0 (2015-04-16)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.10.3 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.2.0

I had earlier tried following the code of help.search and its call to help by reading the code and running trace but was not able to find where the arguments of help.search had been renamed as ‘topic’.

Then running in the Terminal window does not provoke the error.

I had earlier noted that the crash report for the launch of R 3.2.1 from the R.app (GUI) indicated that the directory that the GUI was attempting to load R from was incorrectly specified as: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.3/Resources/

— 
David.
> 
> -- 
> David.
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> Berend
>> 
>> 
>>> On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 8:42 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Jun 13, 2015, at 7:41 AM, Ramnik Bansal wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Getting following error in using help.search
>>>>> 
>>>>>> utils::help.search("linear models")
>>>>> Error in help(db[i, "topic"], package = db[i, "Package"], lib.loc =
>>>> lib,  :
>>>>> 'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word
>>>> 
>>>> I first tried this in a Mac running the SL version for R 3.1.2 and did not
>>>> get this error. I updated my Mavericks laptop to R 3.2.0 and can now
>>>> reproduce this error. It does not seem to depend on having a space in the
>>>> argument. It seems to be thrown by this segment of code in the
>>>> `help()`-function:
>>>> 
>>>> ischar <- tryCatch(is.character(topic) && length(topic) ==
>>>>     1L, error = identity)
>>>> if (inherits(ischar, "error"))
>>>>     ischar <- FALSE
>>>> if (!ischar) {
>>>>     reserved <- c("TRUE", "FALSE", "NULL", "Inf", "NaN",
>>>>         "NA", "NA_integer_", "NA_real_", "NA_complex_", "NA_character_")
>>>>     stopic <- deparse(substitute(topic))
>>>>     if (!is.name(substitute(topic)) && !stopic %in% reserved)
>>>>         stop("'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or
>>>> reserved word")
>>>> 
>>>> If gone through the `help.search` function code and cannot find where the
>>>> `help` function is actually called. This seems unlikely to be a
>>>> Mac-specific problem.
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> example(help.search)
>>>>> 
>>>>> hlp.sr> help.search("linear models")    # In case you forgot how to fit
>>>>> linear
>>>>> Error in help(db[i, "topic"], package = db[i, "Package"], lib.loc =
>>>> lib,  :
>>>>> 'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> How to sort this?
>>>>> 
>>>>>    [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>> 
>>>> David Winsemius
>>>> Alameda, CA, USA
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>> 
>>> ______________________________________________
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>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>> 
> 
> David Winsemius
> Alameda, CA, USA
> 
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David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA