[Rd] R search engine broken (PR#6653)

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

This has been discussed many times on R-help, which would have been a more
appropriate forum,

The issue appears to be not R, not JavaScript but Java.  The latest Sun
JVM, 1.4.2_03, does not work for us, but 1.4.2_01 does (if you can get hold
of it) and for me under Linux 1.4.2_02 does not.  You can use earlier
versions of Java, but not as plugins for browsers compiled under gcc 3.x.

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004 stephane.gourichon at lip6.fr wrote:

> Full_Name: Stéphane Gourichon
> Version: R 1.7.1 (2003-06-16).

Time for an update?

> OS: GNU/Linux

That's nowhere near specific enough for such issues.

> Submission from: (NULL) (132.227.205.226)
>
>
> The HTML help is great. But the search engine is broken.
> It used to work in Galeon 1.x, not Konqueror 3.0 .
>
> Now it doesn't work, neither on Mozilla 1.6 / Firebird 0.6 / Firefox 0.8 nor
> Konqueror 3.2 which are IMHO the latest versions of those advanced,
> standard-compliant browsers.
>
> Sorry I don't know a lot of JavaScript. I don't know quite if this is a security
> feature that prevents it from working, or the use of non-standard JavaScript
> features, or maybe a broken script that happens to work by accident on some
> navigators.

So please follow the advice in the FAQ and do not speculate.  It is
probably the common factor you have missed, your Java installation.

> Anyway, I can use help.search() and I do. But I think R deserves a working
> good-looking search engine. So I write this bug report to suggest investigating
> about it.
>
> Have you considered an on-line, server-based search engine ? This would
> definitely solve the problem, (at least for thse who have Internet access).

We do provide help.search(), which does solve the problem.  The next
release points that out on the Java search engine page.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595