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

[Marianne Promberger]

Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> 01-Sep-11 16:24:
> 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 :
> 
>        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 !).

I would vote for a default of "t"

We are talking about a default. I think it is worse if you expect R to
write a .Rhistory and it doesn't than if you get unnecessary clutter
(because you don't know about the new option to turn off the
Rhistory).

Many ESS users probably don't read this list, or the change notes.

Personally, I would not want to miss .Rhistory files in project folders.

I have a script file for each project. But that is already more
cluttered than I'd like it to be (eg, with analyses that I will not
ultimately report).

I often work with trial-and-error to achieve a task. I do save the end
result to the script file. Later I may have a similar but not
identical task, and I vaguely remember that one of the
trial-and-error-steps would be helpful now. Going through the
.Rhistory is very helpful in that case.

Whichever way you decidee, many thanks for putting together such a
tremendously useful tool!

Marianne

-- 
Marianne Promberger
http://promberger.info
http://participate-in-research.org.uk
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