On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Barry Rowlingson <b.rowling...@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
> But I agree that writing a saveable options package is the first step > - then making that a default in R is the second so people don't have > to edit profiles and R packages and applications can expect an API for > savable state. More thinking about this has turned it into a problem of being able to serialize R objects to XML. The most reliable way I can find of doing that is to use serialize, then rawToChar, and put a big old hex string in the XML. Hardly the most user-friendly format, but then users aren't supposed to edit XML anyway. I have also considered having encoding types for objects, something like: <object encoding="raw" name="foo">66f6e.....a7726</object> <object encoding="numeric" name="bar">3.141</object> <object encoding="numeric" size="2" name="baz"><item>3.14</item><item>6.28</item></object> at which point I remembered that R objects can also have attributes which can be any other R objects too. At which point I realized life's too short for this... ..and had a rethink. Lots of software these days has a configuration directory, and runs all the scripts or configs within - think /etc/cron.daily/ or /etc/init.d on a unix system. This has the advantage that components of the system can manage their own startup files there, and not worry about stomping on others. So you'd have a .Rprofile.d/ folder with, say, a cran.R file that could be sourced by anything that used CRAN, for example to set the default mirror. I'd insist that each file in .Rprofile.d/ started with a "# do not edit this file" warning... I'll think some more over coffee until I realise why this is another of my dumb ideas... Barry ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
