R help - Dec 2007 - Attempt at package documentation on debian: link to "data.frame" broken

Hello,

I'm trying to document this little package I'm working on and have the
following issue:
one of the man files (*.Rd) contains this bit

\value{
  Returns a \code{\link[base]{data.frame}} representing the tabular data.
}

The resulting link is broken on my debian system. It points
to "file:///usr/local/lib/R/site-library/base/html/data.frame.html",
while
the real file resides at
"/usr/lib/R/library/base/html/data.frame.html".

Can someone please let me know how I would fix this?

Thanks, Joh

On Mon, 3 Dec 2007, Johannes Graumann wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to document this little package I'm working on and have
the
> following issue:
> one of the man files (*.Rd) contains this bit
>
> \value{
>  Returns a \code{\link[base]{data.frame}} representing the tabular data.
> }
>
> The resulting link is broken on my debian system. It points
> to
"file:///usr/local/lib/R/site-library/base/html/data.frame.html",
while
> the real file resides at
"/usr/lib/R/library/base/html/data.frame.html".
>
> Can someone please let me know how I would fix this?
So you are talking about the HTML conversion of your help (.Rd) file? 
(Links appear in other versions too.)

The HTML links are intended to be used via help.start(), not directly, and 
I think you find it actually points to ../../base/html/data.frame.html, 
which is correct for use from help.start.  (You are probably quoting your 
browser's intepretation of a relative URL.)

Note what the documentation says:

   There are two other forms of optional argument specified as
   \link[pkg]{foo} and \link[pkg:bar]{foo} to link to the package pkg, to
   files foo.html and bar.html respectively. These are rarely needed,
   perhaps to refer to not-yet-installed packages (but there the
   HTML help system  will resolve the link at run time) or in the normally
   undesirable event that more than one package offers help on a topic
   (in which case the present package has precedence so this is only
   needed to refer to other packages).

So unless you define data.frame() in your package, you don't need this 
form.

-- 
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