[Rd] link in base help file fails.

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 16/03/2009 11:44 PM, Keith Satterley wrote:
> I run R on MS Windows. In R2.9.0dev, I type ?base to get "R help for package 
> base" to open. I then select ".First" from the list of contents, getting a page 
> headed: "Initialization at Start of an R Session". About half way down there is 
> a sentence:
> 
> The command-line flag --vanilla implies --no-site-file, --no-init-file, 
> --no-restore and --no-environ. Under Windows, it also implies --no-Rconsole, 
> which prevents loading the ‘Rconsole’ file.
> 
> The last occurrence of the word Rconsole is in blue text and underlined, a link. 
> On clicking on this link, I get a page headed "This program cannot display the 
> webpage" with advice on "Most likely causes:" and "What you can try".
> 
> Other links work satisfactorily on that page. My internet connection is working.
> 
> I presume there is a problem with this Rconsole link.

After a little looking, this turns out to be a limitation of the CHM 
help file production.  With other formats that support links you don't 
need to specify which package a link goes to, but with CHM help, you do. 
  Since Rconsole is documented in the utils package, this link from base 
failed in that format.

I've fixed other external links to that particular topic, but I imagine 
there are lots of other cross-package links that will still fail in CHM 
files.  Since we will likely replace the file conversion system soon, 
and since CHM files are no longer supported by Microsoft, I am not 
planning to try to fix the old conversion code.  If the fix was easy, it 
would have been in place from the beginning.  But if someone else wants 
to put together a patch (to share/perl/R/Rdconv.pm), I'll test it.

So for now I'd recommend using HTML help rather than CHM help.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
>  > sessionInfo()
> R version 2.9.0 Under development (unstable) (2009-03-13 r48127)
> i386-pc-mingw32
> 
> locale:
> LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  utils     methods   base
>  >
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Keith
> 
> ========================
> Keith Satterley
> Bioinformatics Division
> The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
> Parkville, Melbourne,
> Victoria, Australia
> 
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