R help - Jan 2003 - help.start() directory?

The help for help.start says that 

  "All the packages in the known library trees are linked to
  directory `.R' in the per-session temporary directory. The
  links are re-made each time help.start is run, which should be
  done after packages are installed, updated or removed."

It used to be the case that this was the temporary directory was
the .R directory in my home directory, but since I've upgraded to
R 6.1, the help files are stored in /tmp/Rtmpxxx/.R, where
Rtmpxxx is the result of a call to tempdir.  A side effect of
this is that they are removed when ever I exit R and recreated
when I start R and run help.start again.  I like to be able to
have a couple book marks to my favorite parts of the help pages,
but since the tempdir is different for each instance of R, that
no longer works.  Is there a way to configure R to leave the help
pages in a static location such as ~/.R?  Even if they get
recreated each time I run help.start, I'd rather they always
showed up in the same place.

Thanks, Mike

> R.version
         _                
platform i386-pc-linux-gnu
arch     i386             
os       linux-gnu        
system   i386, linux-gnu  
status                    
major    1                
minor    6.1              
year     2002             
month    11               
day      01               
language R

No, but as these are links you can bookmark the places they link to.

On 3 Jan 2003, Michael A. Miller wrote:
> The help for help.start says that
>
>   "All the packages in the known library trees are linked to
>   directory `.R' in the per-session temporary directory. The
>   links are re-made each time help.start is run, which should be
>   done after packages are installed, updated or removed."
>
> It used to be the case that this was the temporary directory was
> the .R directory in my home directory, but since I've upgraded to
> R 6.1, the help files are stored in /tmp/Rtmpxxx/.R, where
> Rtmpxxx is the result of a call to tempdir.  A side effect of
> this is that they are removed when ever I exit R and recreated
> when I start R and run help.start again.  I like to be able to
> have a couple book marks to my favorite parts of the help pages,
> but since the tempdir is different for each instance of R, that
> no longer works.  Is there a way to configure R to leave the help
> pages in a static location such as ~/.R?  Even if they get
> recreated each time I run help.start, I'd rather they always
> showed up in the same place.
-- 
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