On 15 January 2006 at 01:22, Greg Kochanski wrote:
| > On 14 January 2006 at 15:34, Greg Kochanski wrote:
| > | Sorry! You run
| > |
| > | R --gui=Tk
| > |
| > | then (as you guessed)
| > |
| > | help.start()
| > |
| > | *then* you get a browser window where all the links are dead,
| > | assuming you haven't installed r-doc-html
| >
| > Ok, that confirms that all you need to do is to install r-doc-html. No bug,
| > it is designed this way.
|
| I did *that* before I sent in the bug report.
|
|
| ...
| > | > That would deviate too much from upstream behaviour. The r-base-core
package
| > | > clearly suggests to install documentation, among it the r-doc-html
package,
| > | > so this has the common Debian behaviour.
| > |
| > | Well, the existing behaviour is really rough on someone learning the
| > | package. My initial reaction to this problem was
| > | to mutter "What a broken crock of ***!",
| > | and I'm afraid that a lot of users won't get beyond that point.
| >
| > No so. If you install r-base, you get a recommendation to install
| > r-doc-html.
| >
| > We need to balance between those (like you) who everything installed, and
| > those you want a more fine-grained approach.
|
| Well, recommendations are a dime a dozen.
Debian Policy has a very precise meaning. E.g. from Section 7.2:
`Recommends'
This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.
The `Recommends' field should list packages that would be found
together with this one in all but unusual installations.
| Recommendations without an explanation (which is not provided)
| are about as useful as, well, unsolicited advice.
| Do you install everything that is recommended by every
| package? I doubt it.
That's an empirical question. I probably have the majority installed. For
Quantian I tend to try to add all recommended packages where possible.
In any event, I (and many other users) enjoy having the choice.
| More importantly, the recommendation is long forgotten by
| the time you run into the problem. Even more importantly,
| the user may not be the guy who did the installation.
'apt-cache show r-base-core' or any of the other package tools are there to
query this information and to show it to you.
| Despite your arguments, the fact remains that you cannot
| seriously expect most people to get R's help system working.
| Especially someone without root access.
That is simply wrong.
R's primary help system is the interactive one which does of course work with
just r-base-core as it uses the text files. You showed this yourself.
This has nothing to do with root access, or with who installed it.
You are after a _supplementary_ html help interface for which you need an
additional package. That's all.
| And, you know what? Without a working help system,
| you can't seriously expect many people to use
| the software.
The help system works as I showed you above,
You are also free to de-install the package and compile from source if you
prefer. Thousands of users are happy with the choices we made for Debian's R
packages; but nobody forces you to use these packages.
Regards, Dirk
--
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
-- Thomas A. Edison
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