[R-pkg-devel] CRAN write to home policy

Ogan Mancarci ogan.mancarci at gmail.com
Tue Mar 27 01:06:42 CEST 2018


Thanks for the clarification.

What about a scenario where the user has enter a filename which is used as
a seed for the output file. For instance

antiSocialSkip6Lines = function(filename, output = paste0(filename,
'_skipped')){
    lines = readLines(filename)
    lines = lines[-(1:6)]
}

Here, there is an input from the user which determines what the output is
and it is clearly spelled out in the argument list. Yet the user input is
not the name of the resulting file unless the user wants it to be.

Cheers,
Ogan

On 26 March 2018 at 15:29, Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
wrote:

>
>
> On 26.03.2018 23:48, Ogan Mancarci wrote:
>
>> This is from  CRAN repository policy:
>>
>> "Packages should not write in the user’s home filespace (including
>> clipboards), nor anywhere else on the file system apart from the R
>> session’s temporary directory (or during installation in the location
>> pointed to by TMPDIR: and such usage should be cleaned up). (…) Limited
>> exceptions may be allowed in interactive sessions if the package obtains
>> confirmation from the user."
>>
>> I am unclear about the scope of this rule. For instance if I had this
>> function:
>>
>> antiSocialWriteLines = function(text, file = 'defaultFile', ...){
>>      writeLines(text , file, ...)
>> }
>>
>>
>
> Simply use file=tempfile() as the default so you do not overwrite stuff in
> the user filespace and the user can insert another filename which is the
> confirmation.
>
> Best,
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
> would I be allowed to add it to a package since it writes to a file by
>> default without asking for confirmation?
>>
>> Frankly reading this text, I feel like even writeLines itself violates it
>> as it writes without "confirmation" once you give it a file path.
>>
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>>
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>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
>>
>>

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