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

[Douglas Bates]

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 7:25 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.
>
> 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

I agree that the new capability is very desirable but that there is
probably no need to change the default.  Anyone reading this email
list probably has ess configuration variables set in their ~/.emacs
file anyway so this is just one more to set if you prefer not to have
.Rhistory files created.

> 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
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