Hello, I would like to submit a patch to R. Following 5 Submitting Feature Requests – R Development Guide <https://contributor.r-project.org/rdevguide/chapters/submitting_feature_requests.html>, I would like to ask for feedback before proceeding with a ¿formal? submission on bugzilla. It's my first attempt contributing to R and I do not currently have a bugzilla account.
I am working at a company, and we use R with databricks. We want to install some packages on a distributed filesystem that is not fully POSIX compliant, as it does not support opening files in append mode. In C terms, `open(filename, "a")` gives an error. I guess other distributed file systems beyond the ones in databricks may have issues with append mode as well. Our current workaround is to install all packages on a local folder, and then copy/move the folder to the distributed file system. If I understand package installation correctly, when a package is installed, the installation happens inside a 00LOCK directory, and then the outcome is moved to the final destination. The contribution I would like to submit allows users/sysadmins to set an environment variable named PKG_LOCKDIR_PREFIX, that defines the location where the "00LOCK-" directories are created. The patch is backwards compatible and it consists of +28,-10 lines, hopefully easy enough to review. https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/pull/196.diff When I use this patch, I can successfully install packages on a distributed file system by setting PKG_LOCKDIR_PREFIX to a directory in my local filesystem (R does all the file append stuff in the local file system, and finally copies all the package files to the distributed file system) This setting makes package installation transparent for all data scientists, since they may not even know that PKG_LOCKDIR_PREFIX has been set. Package installation just works as expected. I feel the patch has some added value over our workaround: Even if we implement the workaround with a simple wrapper over install.packages(), any third party package that depends on install.packages() (such as renv or others) won't use our workaround. Besides, with this patch merged any other R user benefits from being able to install packages in those filesystems. Any feedback is very much appreciated. Thanks for your time, Sergio [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
