base package links go nowhere

[jennybc]

If a package imports a base package (e.g., tools, utils, and the like), the base package will appear in Imports in the right sidebar, as a link, but the link doesn't go anywhere.

Example of such a package: https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/R.utils

Example of non-existent link: https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/tools

[jennybc]

Not clear but maybe this is what you mean in #54?

[nuest]

Intriguing issue... Looking at the different options to detect "base" packages, I made the following little script to find out for which pages this applies:

> i <- installed.packages()
> base_pkgs <- i[ i[,"Priority"] %in% c("base"), c("Package")]
> 
> library("httr")
> base_pages <- lapply(paste0("https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/", base_pkgs), GET)
> data.frame(url = sapply(base_pages, function(p) { p$url }), status = sapply(base_pages, status_code))
                                   url status
1       https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/base    404
2   https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/compiler    404
3   https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/datasets    404
4   https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/graphics    404
5  https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/grDevices    404
6       https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/grid    200
7    https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/methods    404
8   https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/parallel    404
9    https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/splines    200
10     https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/stats    404
11    https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/stats4    404
12     https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/tcltk    200
13     https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/tools    404
14     https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/utils    404

Note that tcltk, splines and grid do have pages already, though they are not particularly useful:

• https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/tcltk is basically empty and presumably show the last version that was not a base package but is archived on CRAN (and the mirror on GitHub shows the last commit was 41 years ago...)
• https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/splines has a bit more information, but is also 18 years old - presumably the last version that was published as a package
• https://www.r-pkg.org/pkg/grid apparently is also 15 years old, same case

@jennybc @gaborcsardi What information would you expect to be shown here?

• Output of help(package="utils")
• A link to website with that help, e.g.
  • the respective page from https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/doc/html/packages.html
  • https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/tools/versions/3.4.3/topics/tools-package or

@gaborcsardi I might be looking at this the wrong way, the solution might also be to improve the parsing of the existing DESCRIPTION files, e.g. https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/tools/DESCRIPTION