[Rd] NEWS typos, download.file.Rd tweaks
Ben Bolker
bbolker @ending from gm@il@com
Wed Oct 10 05:22:21 CEST 2018
Some small changes (typo, punctuation fix) to the NEWS file, and some
suggested changes to download.file.Rd (I found some of the phrasing
awkward/hard to parse, and got carried away). (I *think* .txt
attachments are OK on the list?)
FWIW I started fixing the download.file man page because I went there
to understand/be horrified by the following (documented!) infelicity:
with the default settings (on Unix at least), failing to download what
is intended to be a new version of a file will wipe out the original,
leaving an empty file. So, for example, a temporary network problem can
lead to a pipeline being unworkable (because a critical file has been
emptied) until the network comes back ... I don't suppose there's any
chance this behaviour could be changed ... ??
> What happens to the destination file(s) in the case of error
depends on the method and R version. Currently the ‘"internal"’,
‘"wininet"’ and ‘"libcurl"’ methods will remove the file if there
the URL is unavailable except when ‘mode’ specifies appending when
the file should be unchanged.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/293/
cheers
Ben Bolker
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: rdiffs.txt
URL: <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/attachments/20181009/d4f186fd/attachment.txt>
More information about the R-devel
mailing list