PaulG> Also, for users always connected to the Internet, it is not PaulG> really clear that they always need and should be forced to
have > PaulG> the help ...
This maybe practical in a future internet (or in today's net within North-America?) where bandwidth of small files like these is practially zero. Today, even getting only a thousand
bytes can
take many seconds, which is too long.
I am familiar with the low bandwidth problem and I appreciate that lots of people will want to install help files locally. For many people in North America the bandwidth is not so low anymore, and I am simply pointing out that the logic of forcing everyone to install help locally assumes a set of circumstances which may not exist for everyone. (Although, for convenience I can certainly appreciate that doing things one way may be a lot simpler.) On a related, but slightly longer term issue, it is worth at least thinking about the possibility that some code libraries could be loaded on the fly over a high speed Internet. This is a small bandwidth requirement compared to video, which seems to be coming more quickly than most people thought. The advantage of this is that development can be done more easily, continuously and quickly. As long as the installed base portion remains stable, newer libraries could be put in place simply by pointing at them over the network rather than doing an "install" in the fashion with which we are familiar. All this is simply to point out that install strategies should probably be considered to be for the short term rather than the long term. Paul =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=