R devel - Jun 2013 - inconsolata.sty is liable to disappear, texinfo 5.1

We use the inconsolata LaTeX package by default for monospaced text in R 
PDF manuals, including package reference manuals (so needed to R CMD check).

You might find inconsolata.sty suddenly disappearing from your system: 
it happened to me with a MiKTeX update earlier this week.  OTOH, TeXLive 
2013 and MacTeX 2013, released on Tuesday, still have it.  But I suspect 
a TeXLive update may change this shortly.

It seems the LaTeX inconsolata package 
(http://www.ctan.org/pkg/inconsolata) since 2013-06-12 no longer 
contains inconsolata.sty, rather zi4.sty.

Options:

- for existing MiKTeX users, do not accept an update to the inconsolata 
package.

- use R-patched or R-devel, both of which have been modified to use 
zi4.sty if inconsolata.sty is not available.

- if your LaTeX installation gets updated and you do not want to update 
R, you can update just Rd.sty from 
https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/texmf/tex/latex/Rd.sty .  Or you 
could write a file inconsolata.sty as a wrapper for zi4.sty and put it 
in your TEXINPUTS path.


On a similar note, if your system decides to update the GNU texinfo 
package to 5.x and you want to make the R manuals, you need to use 
R-patched or R-devel.   (That includes installing R from the sources.) 
As far as we know, no distro has yet released a version with the 
incompatible texinfo 5.1, but it is in Debian testing and Fedora 19 beta.

-- 
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