[ESS] RFC: and .Rhistory -- new default == *no* .Rhistory ??

[James W. MacDonald]

I vote for the default to be no .Rhistory.

Best,

Jim


On 9/1/2011 11:24 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:
> With this e-mail, we are polling you, the active ESS users.
> Or in other words, we ask you to "vote" on one aspect of this
> issue, for which I need to give a bit more context :
>
>>>>>> Yihui Xie<xie at yihui.name>
>>>>>>      on Sun, 28 Aug 2011 08:24:57 -0500 writes:
>      >  On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Martin Maechler
>      >  <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>  wrote:
>      >>  On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 18:48, Yihui Xie<xie at yihui.name>
>      >>  wrote:
>      >>>  Hi,
>      >>>
>      >>>  Has this been changed in ESS 5.14?
>      >>
>      >>  Nope...  It was just a proposal by Stephen .. and we had
>      >>  forgotten about it.
>      >>
>      >>  BTW (to ESS-core): There's also an ess-history-directory
>      >>  variable (with a "nice" idea behind: You can think of a
>      >>  person-wide "global" history file), which is not at all
>      >>  made use of, currently... and we should
>
>      >  OK, I see. It will be great if ESS does not drop the
>      >  .Rhistory bombs under every single directory in which I
>      >  start R :-)
>
>    [...]
>
> I have now committed changes to the SVN (subversion) development
> version of ESS,  -->   https://svn.r-project.org/ESS/trunk/
> in order to solve these problems.
>
> 1) The user customizable variable  ess-history-directory
>     is now finally made use of.  Consequently, a user now can
>     customize it to, e.g.,
>       "~/.R/.Rhistory"
>      and then have that *one* history file for all projects,
>      and he/she would typically no longer get the message about
>      missing .Rhistory files *nor* would .Rhistory files be created
>      all over the place.
>
> 2) We have implemented Stephen's proposal, namely the
>     customizable variable  ess-history-file  can now have three
>     possible kind of values :
>
>         nil --  do not attempt to read/write a history file
>           t --  use the default naming scheme for loading the history
>     "fname" -- use this value as the filename.
>
>    Note that from above,  't'  corresponds to the current default
>    in ESS (which is 'nil' there !).
>
> Now to the opinion poll :
>
> Many of us really do not care about the R buffer history, since
> we believe that a much more recommendable way is to work with
> *.R script files (and possibly additionally *.Rout "transcript"
> files, by just saving a *R* buffer),
> and the ESS Core team is also in this "camp".
>
> Consequently, we think that it would make sense to have a
> *NON*-back compatible default of 'nil', i.e.,
> not reading nor writing any .Rhistory files at all.
> However, as said, this is not back compatible to the 20 year old
> default behavior of (formerly S-mode, now) ESS,
> and so we are a bit reluctant to just impose such a change to
> the potentially completely unsuspecting user base.
>
>   {{ Of course, we could name the next version of ESS,  6.0 ,
>      but that could also be a bit too much for such a small
>      change .... }}
>
> So now your feedback is very much welcome...
>
> Martin Maechler, for the ESS core team.
>
>
>      >>>  I still see .Rhistory even if I set ess-history-file to
>      >>>  be nil, which has been a pain for me for a long time.
>      >>>
>      >>>  Thanks!
>
>    [...]
>      >>>  Regards, Yihui
>
>      >>>  On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 3:01 AM, Stephen Eglen
>      >>>  <S.J.Eglen at damtp.cam.ac.uk>  wrote:
>      >>>>  Dear Erik, Feng,
>      >>>>
>      >>>>  Thanks for this -- I was blissfully unaware about this
>      >>>>  persistence of history across R sessions.  Howabout if
>      >>>>  we change the semantics of ess-history-file to be:
>      >>>>
>      >>>>      nil --  do not attempt to read/write a history file
>      >>>>        t --  use the default naming scheme for loading the history
>      >>>>  "fname" -- use this value as the filename.
>      >>>>
>      >>>>
>      >>>>  Stephen
>
>      >>>>>  Feng,
>      >>>>>
>      >>>>>  On 04/20/2011 09:00 AM, Feng Li wrote:>  Dear list,
>      >>>>>  >
>      >>>>>  >  I tried to change the ESS default R history to a
>      >>>>>  permanent file so>  that ESS does not generate
>      >>>>>  .Rhistory everywhere. I tried both
>      >>>>>  >
>      >>>>>  >  (setq ess-history-directory "~/.R/history")
>      >>>>>  >
>      >>>>>  >  and
>      >>>>>  >
>      >>>>>  >  (setq ess-history-file "~/.R/history/.Rhistory")
>
>    [.............]
>
> ______________________________________________
> ESS-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-help

-- 
James W. MacDonald, M.S.
Biostatistician
Douglas Lab
University of Michigan
Department of Human Genetics
5912 Buhl
1241 E. Catherine St.
Ann Arbor MI 48109-5618
734-615-7826

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