Problem with Rcmdr Help menu under devel version of R 2.0.0

-----Original Message-----
From: Uwe Ligges [mailto:ligges@statistik.uni-dortmund.de] 
Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2004 5:24 AM
To: John Fox
Cc: r-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [Rd] Problem with Rcmdr Help menu under devel 
version of R 2.0.0

John,

due to some Server modifications on my side and quite a lot 
of changes in R-2.0.0 (in devel) there might be an 
inconsistancy on CRAN. I'll check it this afternoon (MEST).

Uwe Ligges


John Fox wrote:

Dear list members,

I've encountered the following problem with the Rcmdr Help 

menu in the 

development version of R 2.0.0 under Windows XP ("Version 

2.0.0 Under 

development (unstable) (2004-08-20), ISBN 3-900051-00-3"):

The main Commander window has a (tcltk) Help menu with three items, 
"Commander help", "About Rcmdr", and "Introduction to the R 
Commander", which, in the development version of the Rcmdr package, 
call the following three functions:

helpCommander <- function() help("Commander")

helpAboutCommander <- function() help("aboutRcmdr")

browseManual <- function() {
    

browseURL(paste(file.path(.path.package(package="Rcmdr")[1], "doc"), 

        "/Getting-Started-with-the-Rcmdr.pdf", sep=""))
    }

(Of course, there are help pages for "Commander" and 

"aboutRcmdr" in 

the Rcmdr package).

These functions are not exported by the Rcmdr package, but 

as near as 

I can tell, that doesn't seem to be the source of the problem.

The third menu item works fine, but the other two [which 

contain calls 

to help()] appear to do nothing. I've tried several variations, 
including specifying the package argument to help() and using ? in 
place of help(), but to no avail. Curiously, calling, e.g., 
Rcmdr:::helpCommander() directly from the R command prompt 

works just fine.

Unrelated to the above, I've also encountered some MD5 checksum 
problems with R 2.0.0 binary packages for Windows installed 

from CRAN:

------------- output --------------------

files R/car have the wrong MD5 checksums files R/effects have the 
wrong MD5 checksums files R/multcomp have the wrong MD5 checksums 
files R/relimp have the wrong MD5 checksums

-------------  end  ---------------------

Finally, there seems to be a dependency problem with the lmtest 
package Windows binary installed via the "Packages -> 

Install package(s) from CRAN"

menu in the R Console:
    
------------- output --------------------

local({a <- CRAN.packages()

+ install.packages(select.list(a[,1],,TRUE), .libPaths()[1], 
+ available=a,
dependencies=TRUE)})
trying URL 

`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/PACKAGES'

Content type `text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1' length 18348 bytes 
opened URL downloaded 17Kb

also installing the dependencies 'sandwich', 'zoo', 'strucchange'

trying URL

`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/sandwich_0.1-3.zip'

Content type `application/zip' length 75982 bytes opened URL 
downloaded 74Kb

trying URL 

`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/zoo_0.2-0.zip'

Content type `application/zip' length 53003 bytes opened URL 
downloaded 51Kb

trying URL

`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/strucchange
_1.2-4.zip'

Error in download.file(url, destfile, method, mode = "wb") : 
        cannot open URL

`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/strucchange
_1.2-4.zip'

In addition: Warning message: 
cannot open: HTTP status was `404 Not Found' 


-------------  end  ---------------------


Any help would be appreciated, particularly with the problem I'm 
experiencing with the Rcmdr Help menu.

Thanks,
 John