help.start() and Debian packaging (PR#8483)
While I agree with you, I find that the Debian packager does not. I already reported the problem to Debian, and they said that enough people want light-weight installations that they will continue splitting R into several parts. The package maintainer is Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>, and the relevant bug report is 348051. His response was this: | > Ok, that confirms that all you need to do is to install r-doc-html. No bug, | > it is designed this way. Consequently, I can only appeal to your humanity and to good programming practice. It is good programming practice to protect the user from his/her own mistakes, even if those mistakes are made easier/encouraged by Debian. It is also good programming practice to provide appropriate error messages when something goes wrong, even if it "shouldn't" ever go wrong. So, yeah, you can make an argument that you don't have to do it, but R will be a better piece of software if you make the change.
Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
This is all based on a false premise: that a partial install of Debian files is 'R'. R's own scripts do always install the HTML documentation, so help.start() is entitled to assume that it is present. ... Note that your version of 'R' is not current. If there is a bug here, it is in the Debian re-packaging. I trust the Debian packages do contain a bug reporting address other than this one: please use the correct one. (The other binary distributions that I am aware of, e.g. RPMs, do seem to include all of R.) On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 greg.kochanski at phonetics.oxford.ac.uk wrote:
Full_Name: Greg Kochanski Version: 2.2.0 OS: Debian Linux on i686 Submission from: (NULL) (212.159.16.190) Debian packages the R documentation separately from the R core code. Consequently, it is possible for people to have R without the HTML documentation. (In fact, the docs are not installed by default, so it's very likely.) Thus, help.start() cannot depend on the HTML documentation being there. It should check for one (or a few) files and produce some reasonable error message if it is not there. Maybe something like "Warning: the HTML documentation is not installed." Alternatively, help.start() could produce references to some on-line HTML documentation, instead of local documentation. A related bug is that if one calls help.start() when the HTML documentation does not exist, all future calls to help() will lead to errors.
Working as documented is not a bug.