Hi Josselin,
On 9 June 2010 at 18:51, Josselin Mouette wrote:
| Package: r-base-core
| Version: 2.10.1-2
| Severity: wishlist
|
| Hi,
|
| currently the search engine included in the documentation requires a web
| browser to be installed. This is far less than convenient on a
| workstation.
There are alternatives. I have been using R for close to many years and I
just don't use that search engine. I use help,search(foo) at the prompt or
the ?, ??, ??? shortcuts for its variants.
But that is my choice as I don't use the html interface to help all that
much.
As for html help and the internal server, it is an upstream R decision that R
Core took (a while ago and transitioned properly), and that was quite widely
discussed. Not surprisingly some people objected as it was a change.
But anyway, help does not require a webserver. R now embeds one. This is all
documented, try
> help(help)
Eg cut and pasted from the emacs buffer where I see help thanks to ess:
Details:
The following types of help are available:
* Plain text help
* HTML help pages with hyperlinks to other topics, shown in a
browser by ‘browseURL’. (Where possible an existing browser
window is re-used: the Mac OS X GUI uses its own browser
window.) If for some reason HTML help is unavailable (see
‘startDynamicHelp’), plain text help will be used instead.
* For ‘help’ only, typeset as a PostScript or PDF file - see
the section on ‘Offline help’.
| Would it be possible to include indices in another format? For example
| generating .devhelp2 files is often possible with a bit of awk hackery,
| and it allows to browse the documents and search in them using devhelp.
What is .devhelp2? R supports (again, see help(help))
help_type: character string: the type of help required. Possible
values are ‘"text"’, ‘"html"’, ‘"postscript"’, ‘"ps"’ and
‘"pdf"’. Case is ignored, and partial matching is allowed.
Does that help?
| It would be nice to have this - or a similar solution - in the R
| packages.
I try hard to "just" provide an excellent package in the sense that I use all
good hooks provided by upstream. I also try not make Debian's R "different".
If I read your request correctly, then there is no real issue. R serves its
html help pages internally (no server needed) and can (as always) convert
help into other formats (but now does that with R code rather than external
Perl scripts).
So it that sense this is purely an upstream wishlist bug and I so I'd like to
close this here. Could you possibly argue your case on r-devel instead?
If I misunderstood, please feel free to correct me.
--
Regards, Dirk
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