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

[Yihui Xie]

I never use .Rhistory. Thanks!

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA



On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 10:33 AM, James W. MacDonald
<jmacdon at med.umich.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
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