default pager is more

FYI I added less back to the buildroot. Updates will be published soon.

I?aki

On Thu, 18 Jul 2024 at 18:59, Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, 18 Jul 2024 at 10:12, I?aki Ucar <iucar at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

On Wed, 17 Jul 2024 at 11:33, Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:

Was wondering why R help in recent Fedora only provided --More--
prompt for viewing, rather than allowing arrow key navigation as on
RHEL. It turns out it uses a system command for paging and the current
default pager is more:
grep PAGER /usr/lib64/R/etc/Renviron
PAGER=${PAGER-'/usr/bin/more'}

rpm -qf /usr/lib64/R/etc/Renviron
R-core-4.4.1-3.fc41.x86_64

This was dropped as part of an effort to minimize dependencies of

R-core, with e.g. containers in mind.

R-core is > 100MB not including dependencies.
"R" additionally pulls R-devel and another 167MB of installed
dependencies.
less is ~370kB (and incidentally a dependency of git)

This primarily affects function help, where less is much more capable
for navigation and searching.

Back in 2011 there was some discussion on this list, it it seems the
intention is the default should be less:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-fedora/2011-August/000194.html

These days there are other utilities more capable than less.

This is not really the issue, although if there are any that can be
expected to be well supported and are in fact included in Fedora then
please do consider making one the default. "most" installs at about
130kB, although R will not autoconfigure to use it. Maybe suggest it
to upstream?

Also these days most people don't read R docs in the console.

Ah, I'm "holding it wrong".
Installing Rstudio to read documentation is 580MB and only useful
locally. Additionally these are R docs, not R Studio docs.

If you do and do have a preferred pager, then you can do e.g.

$ echo "PAGER=less" >> ~/.Renviron

Yes, I can set an environment variable.

and you're good to go.

I was aware of that before writing. However this represents a lot of
wasted effort for every person who encounters this; it is not obvious
where in the documentation to look,
https://www.r-project.org/help.html or help(help) do not make any
mention of file.show().

<snip>

I suspect this was fixed (certainly don't remember it from Fedora <39,
but I'd have to hunt down packages to check) and has regressed
relatively recently.

As said, it is not a regression, but a conscious decision.

This is certainly a point of view.


--
imalone

--
I?aki ?car