R help - Oct 2010 - installing ONLY the documentation files (Rd) for many packages?

I have been searching the documentation for some time nmow, but cannot find it.
It must be possible to download packages (many), but only install the
help system?

How?

Kjetil

On Tue, 26 Oct 2010, Kjetil Halvorsen wrote:
> I have been searching the documentation for some time nmow, but 
> cannot find it. It must be possible to download packages (many), but 
> only install the help system?
I am not sure what you actally want: R CMD INSTALL does not install 
the Rd files -- it installs a database of parsed Rd files.

All things are possible in a programming language, but you would need 
to study the R code of INSTALL to see what to extract.  One 
possibility would be to run a loop of calls to  R CMD Rdconv to 
install HTML versions of help (which some people have asked for in the 
past).

However, disk space is cheap, and I would simply install the packages 
and discard the parts you don't want.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595