[R] debian packages and html help on linux

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Kari Ruohonen wrote:

> I have a fresh installation of R from debian unstable packages. The
> html index found in /usr/lib/R/doc/html/index.html works in Mozilla
> and under the link of 'packages' on this page I have a list and
> corresponding links. However, it appears that not all packages I have
> installed from available deb files via apt-get, will get their link
> updated to this package index. Specifically, from packages
> r-cran-boot, r-cran-car, r-cran-coda, r-cran-design, r-cran-effects,
> r-cran-foreign, r-cran-gregmisc, r-cran-hmisc, r-cran-its,
> r-cran-lattice, r-cran-lmtest, r-cran-mcmcpack, r-cran-mgcv,
> r-cran-multcomp, r-cran-relimp, r-cran-rgl, r-cran-rpart, r-cran-sm,
> r-cran-tseries, r-cran-vr, r-omegahat-ggobi, r-cran-kernsmooth none
> appeared to html package index. This also means that html search
> doesn't find functions within these packages although it otherwise
> works perfectly with my Mozilla.
> 
> What shall I do to get also these package to the package index?

Use the correct index: see ?help.start.  Installing a package does not 
update /usr/lib/R/doc/html/packages.html, but help.start() creates a 
current index dynamically.

If you really want to do this without running R, use

R CMD perl /usr/lib/R/share/perl/build-help.pl --htmllists

to update the static index.  From inside R you can run 
make.packages.html().  In both cases, you need write permission in 
/usr/lib/R/doc/html.

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595