Le mercredi 09 juin 2010 à 12:25 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel a écrit : > | 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.
Indeed I know that, and it doesn’t bother me personally. However I have complaints from some of our users who prefer to search in GUIs. > But anyway, help does not require a webserver. R now embeds one. This is all > documented, try > > > help(help) I’ll have a closer look, thanks for the hint. This will hopefully be enough. My request can stand since I would still find it useful, but the solution you provided makes it less important. > | 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? devhelp is a documentation browser. It can show and search in any HTML documentation, provided there are indices in the devhelp format (it is a simple XML file). For example Python provides such indices, and devhelp is by far the most convenient way of browsing the Python documentation. The index file is necessary to be able to search in function names. > 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". Sure. I don’t think there’s anything Debian-specific here. > 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? I’m not very much into R myself. Is there an upstream bug-tracker? -- .''`. Josselin Mouette : :' : `. `' “If you eat pasta without sauce, it is nothing `- short of communism.” -- Marie -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
