[Rd] Problem with Rcmdr Help menu under devel version of R 2.0.0

[John Fox]

Dear list members,

I've encountered the following problem with the Rcmdr Help menu in the
development version of R 2.0.0 under Windows XP ("Version 2.0.0 Under
development (unstable) (2004-08-20), ISBN 3-900051-00-3"):

The main Commander window has a (tcltk) Help menu with three items,
"Commander help", "About Rcmdr", and "Introduction to the R Commander",
which, in the development version of the Rcmdr package, call the following
three functions:

helpCommander <- function() help("Commander")

helpAboutCommander <- function() help("aboutRcmdr")

browseManual <- function() {
    browseURL(paste(file.path(.path.package(package="Rcmdr")[1], "doc"), 
        "/Getting-Started-with-the-Rcmdr.pdf", sep=""))
    }

(Of course, there are help pages for "Commander" and "aboutRcmdr" in the
Rcmdr package).

These functions are not exported by the Rcmdr package, but as near as I can
tell, that doesn't seem to be the source of the problem.

The third menu item works fine, but the other two [which contain calls to
help()] appear to do nothing. I've tried several variations, including
specifying the package argument to help() and using ? in place of help(),
but to no avail. Curiously, calling, e.g., Rcmdr:::helpCommander() directly
from the R command prompt works just fine.

Unrelated to the above, I've also encountered some MD5 checksum problems
with R 2.0.0 binary packages for Windows installed from CRAN:

------------- output --------------------

files R/car have the wrong MD5 checksums
files R/effects have the wrong MD5 checksums
files R/multcomp have the wrong MD5 checksums
files R/relimp have the wrong MD5 checksums

-------------  end  ---------------------

Finally, there seems to be a dependency problem with the lmtest package
Windows binary installed via the "Packages -> Install package(s) from CRAN"
menu in the R Console:
    
------------- output --------------------

> local({a <- CRAN.packages()
+ install.packages(select.list(a[,1],,TRUE), .libPaths()[1], available=a,
dependencies=TRUE)})
trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/PACKAGES'
Content type `text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1' length 18348 bytes
opened URL
downloaded 17Kb

also installing the dependencies 'sandwich', 'zoo', 'strucchange'

trying URL
`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/sandwich_0.1-3.zip'
Content type `application/zip' length 75982 bytes
opened URL
downloaded 74Kb

trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/zoo_0.2-0.zip'
Content type `application/zip' length 53003 bytes
opened URL
downloaded 51Kb

trying URL
`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/strucchange_1.2-4.zip'
Error in download.file(url, destfile, method, mode = "wb") : 
        cannot open URL
`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/strucchange_1.2-4.zip'
In addition: Warning message: 
cannot open: HTTP status was `404 Not Found' 
> 

-------------  end  ---------------------


Any help would be appreciated, particularly with the problem I'm
experiencing with the Rcmdr Help menu.

Thanks,
 John