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

[Patrick Connolly]

On Fri, 02-Sep-2011 at 11:35AM +0100, Marianne Promberger 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).


I agree with Marianne and I struggle to understand how a .Rhistory
file in each directory constitutes clutter.  The very layout of the
directory structure removes the clutter.  What *would* be clutter is a
single file with history of hundreds of projects mixed together and
thereby useless.  Over time, I have accumulated very similar scripts
in dozens of directories.  Admitedly, I don't use the .Rhistory that
often, but I have occasionally found it useful to find something I did
incidently but didn't record in the .R file -- mistakenly thinking I
was avoiding clutter in that august file. :-)



-- 
~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.   
   ___    Patrick Connolly   
 {~._.~}                   Great minds discuss ideas    
 _( Y )_  	         Average minds discuss events 
(:_~*~_:)                  Small minds discuss people  
 (_)-(_)  	                      ..... Eleanor Roosevelt
	  
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