R-developers: Duncan Murdoch suggested I move a post I started on r-help over here, since it is more at the developer level. Here is my question/challenge -- to my knowledge, there is not currently an official way to store a *package*'s options to a standardized location on a user's computer. Given that OS-level programs have standard preference locations, I was hoping to first assess:
- Does R, in fact, have a place for a *package* to store preferences (a file-based "setOptions") that would be persistent across sessions. One suggestion that was given was to perhaps write these options to the .RProfile, but this strikes me as potentially dangerous -- a poorly written function to write to a user's .RProfile could corrupt it. If the answer to the initial question is "no" (there is not an official location/approach for a package to store its own files), I'd like to suggest we open this for a wider discussion amongst the developers, to perhaps come up with a general (not package-by-package) solution for a package to store options (and perhaps other files) in a standard location. The particular application that has brought me to asking about this is that I'm writing a package that has external calls to command-line programs that may not be properly registered with a user's environment (think: Windows, in particular, although I've found issues with a Mac as well), so the first step of these R - wrapper functions is to search a user's local machine for the binaries. If it finds it, it stores the path to this binary as an option. Since this is a brute-force search, this can take some time and, ideally, this information would be preserved across sessions, without the function having to re-search their drive every time they start R fresh. --j -- Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD Assistant Professor Global Environmental Analysis and Remote Sensing (GEARS) Laboratory Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 259 Computing Applications Building, MC-150 605 East Springfield Avenue Champaign, IL 61820-6371 Phone: 217-300-1924 http://www.geog.illinois.edu/~jgrn/ AIM: jgrn307, MSN: jgrn...@hotmail.com, Gchat: jgrn307, Skype: jgrn3007 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
