Le vendredi 18 octobre 2013 à 19:32 -0500, Jonathan Greenberg a écrit : > 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. I support this request. This would be useful for Rcmdr and Rcmdr plug-ins to save GUI preferences in a cleaner fashion than writing to .Rprofile. A major use case for R base itself would be to store the default CRAN mirror once for all instead of asking the user every time (s)he installs a package.
Any mechanism will do, from a simple .ini style key-value file to serializing and restoring an arbitrary (but usually very simple) R object. .Rprofile is really not designed to store preferences. A per-package way of saving settings would mean that a package has no chance of messing with the user's global settings when it is not loaded, reducing the risk of breakage. Regards ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
