typo in docs for unlink()

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
  

On 10/11/2009 11:16 PM, Tony Plate wrote:
    

PS, I should have said that I'm reading the docs for unlink in R-2.10.0 on
a Linux system.  The docs that appear in a Windows installation of R are
different (the Windows docs do not mention that not all systems support
recursive=TRUE).

Here's a plea for docs to be uniform across all systems!  Trying to write
R code that works on all systems is much harder when the docs are different
across systems, and you might only see system specific notes on a different
system than the one you're working on.
      

That's a good point, but in favour of the current practice, it is very
irritating when searches take you to functions that don't work on your
system.

One thing that might be possible is to render all versions of the help on
all systems, but with some sort of indicator (e.g. a colour change) to
indicate things that don't apply on your system, or only apply on your
system.  I think the hardest part of doing this would be designing the
output; actually implementing it would not be so bad.
    

I 2nd this wishlist - to see the documentation for all (known)
platforms, if possible.  

A very simple solution is to have an Rd
section on operating-system specific features, e.g.
\section{Differences between operating systems}{...}.

This would decrease the trial and error of producing cross-platform code.

  

/Henrik

  

Duncan Murdoch

    

-- Tony Plate

Tony Plate wrote:
      

The VALUE section in the help for 'unlink' says:

|  0| for success, |1| for failure. Not deleting a non-existent file is
not a failure, nor is being unable to delete a directory if |recursive =
FALSE|. However, missing values in |x| result are regarded as failures.

The last phrase doesn't make sense to me.  Should it be either "missing
values in x are regarded as failures" or "missing values in x result in
failure" ?

Also, after reading the docs, I'm still unable to work out if unlink()
will return 1 when the user tries to recursively delete a directory on
systems that don't support recursive=T.

The DETAILS section says "recursive=TRUE is not supported on all
platforms, and may be ignored, with a warning", which could be interpreted
as implying no special action when recursive=TRUE is not implemented (other
than a warning()), and the VALUE section doesn't say what the return value
will be under such conditions.

I've skimmed the various *_unlink functions in src/main/platform.c, and
it looks like they all implement recursive=TRUE, so I'm still in the dark
about the required behavior on systems that don't support it.  Could this be
clarified in the help file?

thanks,

Tony Plate