[Rd] help system does not work (PR#499)

[jgm@qed.econ.queensu.ca]

Thanks for the very speedy response.

I just tried again, but this time on my office machine, and I am extremely
embarrassed to report that everything seems to work fine! The only problem
is that the headings under "Data Analysis with R" are not actually links,
but no doubt that is because they are not (yet) supposed to be. 

It seems to be only on my home machine, where I was trying to experiment
with R last night, that there is a problem. I think the problem must have
something to do with the way in which netscape is installed on the two
machines. "which netscape" yields different results on the two of them.

I am pretty sure I can solve the problem now. I presume that R is passing
a command like "netscape URL" to the operating system, and I am pretty
sure that "URL" is not getting through on my home machine because it is
finding a script instead of the real executable. I think I just need to
change the script to pass its arguments to netscape. Unfortunately, I
cannot check the fix while I am at the office.

Incidentally, is there some way I can change the command that R is
issuing? That way, I could point it directly to a particular executable (I
have several netscapes).  Also, I would like to experiment with having it
fire up lynx in an xterm rather than netscape, if that is possible.

On 22 Mar 2000, Douglas Bates wrote:

> When you use help.start it is supposed to create and populate a
> directory ~/.R.  Within there there should be an html directory and
> links to several of the html files in /usr/lib/R/doc/html.

Yes, these directories are present on both machines, and the contents seem
to be fine. I think R itself is working fine.
 
> BTW, my daughter, who is a student at Queen's, tells me that you are
> having wonderful weather right now.  She was down to the lakefront to
> do some reading yesterday.

Incredible weather, actually. It is bright and sunny and warm enough that
a jacket really isn't needed.

I am very sorry to have bothered you. Should I do something to close the
bug report?

Cheers, James.

James G. MacKinnon                       Department of Economics
    phone: 613 533-2293                  Queen's University
      Fax: 613 533-2257                  Kingston, Ontario, Canada
    Email: jgm@qed.econ.queensu.ca       K7L 3N6



-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._