R search engine broken (PR#6653) - R-devel

Mon, Mar 8, 2004 5:58 AM #

Full_Name: St?phane Gourichon
Version: R 1.7.1 (2003-06-16).
OS: GNU/Linux
Submission from: (NULL) (132.227.205.226)


The HTML help is great. But the search engine is broken.
It used to work in Galeon 1.x, not Konqueror 3.0 .

Now it doesn't work, neither on Mozilla 1.6 / Firebird 0.6 / Firefox 0.8 nor
Konqueror 3.2 which are IMHO the latest versions of those advanced,
standard-compliant browsers.

Sorry I don't know a lot of JavaScript. I don't know quite if this is a security
feature that prevents it from working, or the use of non-standard JavaScript
features, or maybe a broken script that happens to work by accident on some
navigators.

Anyway, I can use help.search() and I do. But I think R deserves a working
good-looking search engine. So I write this bug report to suggest investigating
about it.

Have you considered an on-line, server-based search engine ? This would
definitely solve the problem, (at least for thse who have Internet access).

Thanks a lot.

Brian Ripley

Mon, Mar 8, 2004 6:24 AM #

This has been discussed many times on R-help, which would have been a more
appropriate forum,

The issue appears to be not R, not JavaScript but Java.  The latest Sun
JVM, 1.4.2_03, does not work for us, but 1.4.2_01 does (if you can get hold
of it) and for me under Linux 1.4.2_02 does not.  You can use earlier
versions of Java, but not as plugins for browsers compiled under gcc 3.x.

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004 stephane.gourichon@lip6.fr wrote:

Time for an update?

That's nowhere near specific enough for such issues.

So please follow the advice in the FAQ and do not speculate.  It is
probably the common factor you have missed, your Java installation.

We do provide help.search(), which does solve the problem.  The next
release points that out on the Java search engine page.

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

Stéphane Gourichon

Mon, Mar 8, 2004 6:55 AM #

Le lundi 8 Mars 2004 14:24, Prof Brian D Ripley a ?crit :

Oh, sorry. 
I did check for bugs (closed or open) about this before posting, of course.

Thanks for the tip. If a Linux-specific FAQ existed it would include it.

Ah yes, I see 1.8.1 is available and even with Mandrake. Thanks.
I'm downloading it now.

Yes, you're quite right. I was focused on platform-neutral issues.

(It's a pity that Java seems rarely to work out-of-the box on installing a 
Free OS, especially in browsers.)

I can't find anything about the search engine on 
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html

Ah, I see it. It is in the Windows-specific FAQ. 

May I suggest to make this an item in the generic FAQ since Java and 
Javascript are meant to be platform-neutral languages and the problem is not 
platform-specific ?

Also, I would suggest that the FAQ includes the wording "search engine" and 
not only "search system", because it is how the page is actually names. I 
think many people falling on that issue look for those words ("search" occurs 
many times in the FAQ).

Yes, the search page itself is the best place to notify the user.

(Just an idea : the JavaScript code would perform return value check for the 
proper start of the java part and display a message on failure ? I don't know 
if it's possible, though.

  line = line + document.SearchEngine.search (searchTerm,
                                        searchDesc=="1",
                                        searchKeywords=="1",
                                        searchAliases=="1");
)

St?phane Gourichon - Labo. d'Informatique de Paris 6 - AnimatLab
http://animatlab.lip6.fr/ - philo du dimanche http://amphi-gouri.org/

? La meilleure fa?on de pr?dire l'avenir, c'est de le cr?er ? Peter Drucker

Marc Schwartz

Mon, Mar 8, 2004 10:48 AM #

On Mon, 2004-03-08 at 07:24, Prof Brian D Ripley wrote:

To add to Prof. Ripley's comments, I have copied the requisite j2re
files to my web server so that they can be made available to the
community.

I located version 1.4.2_01 on a mirror this morning, though it was
rather slow in downloading.

The two files are:

http://www.MedAnalytics.com/j2re-1_4_2_01-linux-i586.bin
http://www.MedAnalytics.com/j2re-1_4_2_01-linux-i586-rpm.bin

I also put an md5sum file here:

http://www.MedAnalytics.com/MD5SUM

You only need ONE of the above, depending upon whether you have a system
that supports RPM packages or otherwise have a personal preference.

Installation help is available here from Sun:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/linux_install.jsp

The RPM will install java and the browser plugins here:

/usr/java/j2re1.4.2_01/plugin/i386


Once you have one of the above installed, you then need to create a
symlink to the browser plugin. I have found that doing this in my local
home directory is easier than doing it in the mozilla version specific
directory. As a result, in ~/.mozilla/plugins, use the following
command:

ln -s path_to_java/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Replace 'path_to_java' with the actual installation path and if you are
not using a gcc3.x system, change the 'ns610-gcc32' to 'ns610'.

Doing it this way, the plugin will work for both Mozilla and Firefox.

Once you have completed the install, go here to test the browser plugin:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.jsp

You can then test the R help.start() search engine. If this has been
done properly, you should see "Applet SearchEngine started" in the lower
left hand corner of the browser status bar, when you select the Search
Engine link on the initial page.

I don't know if it may be reasonable or appropriate to copy these to
CRAN. If not, I can leave them on my site until further notice. I tested
the download speed and was getting >300 kbps, so as long as the site
does not get "slashdotted" it should be OK...  :-)

HTH,

Marc Schwartz