[R] To improve my understanding of workspaces

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 3/10/2006 1:53 PM, Kevin E. Thorpe wrote:
> 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?

It needn't be very cumbersome after you've set it up, but the setup 
would be a bit daunting if you haven't used it before.  If you can find 
someone who has used it before to do the setup for you, you'll find it a 
lot less intimidating.  I'd be happy to do this for you if you come to 
London for the SSC meeting in May.  (This offer doesn't just apply to 
Kevin, but he's more likely to come to that meeting than most of the 
readers of this list.  If anyone else is interested, drop me a line 
privately.  And remember that's London, Canada, not the other one.)

If you're working in Windows, use the TortoiseSVN front-end as well as 
the command line tools.  I started with the command line tools but use 
TSVN most of the time now.

I also recommend reading the O'Reilly book, Version Control with 
Subversion.  It's available online at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/.

Duncan Murdoch
> 
>> 
>> 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
>