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

[Joshua Wiley]

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:25 AM, Guy Freeman <gfreeman at hku.hk> wrote:
> 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.

I would expect that almost anyone who uses Emacs these days is
something of a "leet" user.

>
> 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

If the default is nil, this would be an additional argument for
displaying a message (Emacs is fond of messages anyways) saying that
the default is now ____

>
> 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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>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-help
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Dr. Guy Freeman, Post-Doctoral Fellow
> School of Public Health
> Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine
> The University of Hong Kong
> Tel: +852 - 39062034
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> Fax: +852 - 35201945
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>



-- 
Joshua Wiley
Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
Programmer Analyst II, ATS Statistical Consulting Group
University of California, Los Angeles
https://joshuawiley.com/