R devel - Oct 2005 - Post processing need for installing packages in rpms.

Hello,
        I maintain some packages in Fedora Extras for R related modules.

        Until R 2.2.0 I used for post processing (both after installing and
removing the package) the following lines:

%{_bindir}/R CMD perl %{_libdir}/R/share/perl/build-help.pl --htmllists
cat %{_libdir}/R/library/*/CONTENTS > %{_libdir}/R/doc/html/search/index.txt

        Typically %{_bindir} is /usr/bin and %{_libdir} is /usr/lib or
/usr/lib64

        The purpose of those lines is to enable the access to the module
documentation from R help. The first refers to html and the second to the
text help variant.

        With R 2.2.0 build-help.pl no longer has the --htmllists option. Is
there any easy replacement, or is there any other method to achieve the same
results?

        FWIW, I have searched trough the release notes as well as through the
documentation for sys admins and for package developers without any
success.

        Best regards,
-- 
Jos? Ab?lio

On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, [UTF-8] Jos? Matos wrote:
> Hello,        I maintain some packages in Fedora Extras for R related
modules.
>        Until R 2.2.0 I used for post processing (both after installing
andremoving the package) the following lines:
> %{_bindir}/R CMD perl %{_libdir}/R/share/perl/build-help.pl --htmllistscat
%{_libdir}/R/library/*/CONTENTS > %{_libdir}/R/doc/html/search/index.txt
>        Typically %{_bindir} is /usr/bin and %{_libdir} is /usr/lib
or/usr/lib64
>        The purpose of those lines is to enable the access to the
moduledocumentation from R help. The first refers to html and the second to
thetext help variant.
>        With R 2.2.0 build-help.pl no longer has the --htmllists option.
Isthere any easy replacement, or is there any other method to achieve the
sameresults?
It is no longer needed: the information is now built by R at runtime.
>        FWIW, I have searched trough the release notes as well as through
thedocumentation for sys admins and for package developers without anysuccess.
For an outsider it might not be obvious that the NEWS entry

     o   R_HOME/doc/html/packages.html is now remade by R not Perl code.
         This may result in small changes in layout and a change in
         encoding (to UTF-8 where supported).

refers to this.  (Note that build-help.pl --htmllists was never documented 
as part of R's API.)

I checked Martyn Plummer's R.spec on CRAN, but that is out-of-date. 
Please look at the R.spec in his current SRPM, which works for me.

-- 
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