[R-pkg-devel] Dealing with not so temporary files

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12/03/2018 6:26 PM, Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal wrote:
> Hi All:
> 
> Recently there was a proper admonishment to a developer that it is bad etiquette writing to a user's home directory,  and for temporary files use the functions tempdir() and tempfile().  I am working on a new package (presently on Github) that downloads data from a remote server,  reads the data into R,  but I would like to save that file for the user to access later if they so desire.  Saving to the "temp directory" is not a good option for that,  want to put it somewhere where the user can easily find it.  What is the proper etiquette for this?  Even if I provide an argument for the user to specify the location to save the file,  I should provide a default location.

Why not provide an argument whose default is something given by tempfile()?

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Any suggestions appreciated.
> 
> -Roy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> **********************
> "The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or NOAA."
> **********************
> Roy Mendelssohn
> Supervisory Operations Research Analyst
> NOAA/NMFS
> Environmental Research Division
> Southwest Fisheries Science Center
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> e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn at noaa.gov www: http://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/
> 
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