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

[Yihui Xie]

I agree. I will certainly add an additional line in my .emacs, so the
default does not have to be nil.

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 Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Douglas Bates <bates at stat.wisc.edu> wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> ESS-help at r-project.org mailing list
>>> 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
>> Mob: +852 - 68790289
>> Fax: +852 - 35201945
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>> Web: http://sph.hku.hk/faculty_and_staff_detail.php?id=171
>>
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>>
>
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