[R] To improve my understanding of workspaces

[Kevin E. Thorpe]

Sean Davis wrote:
> 
> On 3/10/06 8:33 AM, "Duncan Murdoch" <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Other than Emacs, I use the same work habits as Adai.  An advantage of
>>this workflow is that almost everything is stored in text format, so it
>>is easy to compare different versions to see what has changed, and it
>>works very well with version control (I use Subversion).
>>
>>The only thing I'd add to his recommendation is that you be sure to save
>>the scripts that produced the objects in the binary images (his
>>"lala.rda"), so that they can be reconstructed if necessary.  As long as
>>the reconstruction isn't too difficult, this means I don't need to
>>bother to save them in Subversion.

Version control sounds like a good idea Duncan, but I've always been a
bit intimidated by it.  How cumbersome is Subversion and what are the
advantages of version control?

> 
> I would add a bit of detail here that I do.  ESS/xemacs allows one to create
> a transcript file that you can then step through, executing each command as
> it was originally executed.  I make one of these transcript files for each
> project and save it with the data and any scripts that I have for the
> project.  So, in the end, I have a set of Rda files, one or more transcript
> files, and a Src directory that contains any function code (and ESS supports
> saving scripts to this directory automatically).

Do you save your functions in Rda files to be loaded/attached or are
they sourced every time?  How do you tell ESS/emacs to save in ./src or
is that only possible with xemacs (I can use emacs to do what I need to
but don't know lisp so the config files and terminology are a bit
cryptic to me)?

Kevin

-- 
Kevin E. Thorpe
Biostatistician/Trialist, Knowledge Translation Program
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences
Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
email: kevin.thorpe at utoronto.ca  Tel: 416.946.8081  Fax: 416.946.3297