The X USE Flag for R currently controls whether R is build with X11-Support, meaning plotting to an X-Surface. At the same time, the USE-Flag is also made control whether xdg-open will be pulled in so that help.start( ) will open http://127.0.0.1:21671/doc/html/index.html. It would be preferable if those two unrelated functionalities could be split out into two distinct use flags. Optimally, if the build process allows for it, the whole "Local Help served by R over HTTP" part could be disabled (we can use /usr/share/doc like for every other program), so this would perfectly well work out as two USE Flags X - X11( );-Driver support http - Stub-(I hope!)-HTTP-Server support for serving the help over HTTP, accompanied by xdg-open to open the URL with the preffered browser.
> (we can use /usr/share/doc like for every other program) This was nonsense. The on-line help would still be available. Also, I only learned that the HTTP function is actually used to generate the help pages on the fly - not serving them from the disk. Regardless, the xdg-open dependency should relate to the HTTP function and not be part of the USE-Flag which controls whether the X11-driver is built.
Please don't do that.
(In reply to comment #2) > Please don't do that. Please don't do what? I'd like to remind you that it's not appropriate for you to remove CC's or change a bug's other attributes if you have no business doing so. Further, plase refrain from making incomprehensible comments absent justification or context.
FYI: I'd added Denis to CC because I opened this bug on his behalf after talking to him on IRC.
