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

[Guy Freeman]

I agree with Marianne, including being grateful for your hard work!

This shouldn't be treated as an election, but as an opportunity to
explore the consequences for non-"leet" users.

Keep default -> harmless if messy .Rhistory file created, which can be
turned off for those who are very obsessive about these things ;)
Change default -> great for those that expect it, disaster for those that didn't

Just my 2 cents.

Guy

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 18:35, Marianne Promberger
<marianne.promberger at kcl.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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
> GnuPG/PGP public key ID 80AD9916
>
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>



--
Dr. Guy Freeman, Post-Doctoral Fellow
School of Public Health
Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine
The University of Hong Kong
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