[Bug 344656] [NEW] Online docs missing, not available in separate package

[jsteinhart]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: r-base-core-ra

The "online" R documentation is not available within Ra. For example, type
> ?ls

or 
> help("ls")

and R reports that it's not available.

While it is certainly possible to externally access the documentation
provided with the standard r packages, this severely limits the
convenience of writing large amounts of R code within Ra -- especially
when using something like Emacs/ESS, which provides command completion,
"live" function signatures/arguments, and integrated documentation
browsing.

Presumably, the docs from the standard packages could be added to the
search path. However I think that the problem there is, that for
packages that Ra actually reimplements, it may only want to get those
docs beneath the Ra lib directory /usr/lib/Ra/lib/R/ where it actually
loaded the code from.

If this understanding is correct, I see 3 options:
1) Ra package creates symlinks to standard doc files (presumably per-file, which would be messy)
2) Ra package includes its own copies of these doc files
3) A new doc package is created to provide these files

Since it looks like the doc files for the base R modules are included
with the base packages themselves (and not in separate r-doc-*
packages), it would seem that #2 is the best option to preserve
uniformity.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: r-base-core-ra 1.1.2-1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/home/username/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/arm-elf/bin
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: r-base-core-ra
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-11-generic i686

** Affects: r-base-core-ra (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: apport-bug

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Online docs missing, not available in separate package
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/344656
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