[R] Persistent storage between package invocations

[Henrik Bengtsson]

It would be nice to have a standard directory where R can write things
this way.  A semi-standard directory is given by
Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER"), which defaults to ~/R/.../.  Maybe ~/R/
could serve as that convention?  That way we (various developers etc)
would also not clutter up users home directory in "random" ways.

Personally I prefer a hidden directory, e.g. ~/.R/, but there are pros
and cons with such an approach.

/Henrik


On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:57 AM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Mar 2011, Hadley Wickham wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Does anyone have any advice or experience storing package settings
>> between R runs?  Can I rely on the user's home directory (e.g.
>> tools::file_path_as_absolute("~")) to be available and writeable
>> across platforms?
>
> No.  First, please use path.expand("~") for this, and it does not
> necessarily mean the home directory (and in principle it might not expand at
> all).  In practice I think it will always be *a* home directory, but on
> Windows there may be more than one (and watch out for local/roaming profile
> differences).
>
> Second, it need not be writeable, and so many package authors write rubbish
> in my home directory that I usually arrange it not be writeable to R test
> processes.
>
> If you want something writeable across processes, use dirname(tempdir()) .
>
>>
>> Hadley
>>
>> --
>> Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
>> Department of Statistics / Rice University
>> http://had.co.nz/
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>>
>
> --
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
> University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>