[R-pkg-devel] R package which creates a directory in the user home dir

[Brian G. Peterson]

On Thu, 2019-10-17 at 14:29 +0200, Sigbert Klinke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'am developing a package that circumvents the R package size
> limitation 
> for data sets. For this I store the data set in the internet
> (currently 
> GitHub) and download if it is requested.
> 
> To avoid unnecessary downloads and internet connections I create a 
> directory in the users home directory to store the data there.
> However, 
> this violates the "CRAN Repository Policy" which says
> 
> - 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).
> 
> Do I have any chance to get the package to CRAN, if I submit it?

To be sure, you'd need to ask the CRAN staff, but probably not.

You could probably add an option that defaults to FALSE to persist the
data.  Then wrap that in a check.  if persist=TRUE, check to see if the
file exists.  if it exists in the subdirectory of the working
directory, then load it.  otherwise create the subdirectory of the
current working directory, load from the internet, and save the data
locally.

In this way you've had the user explicitly direct the function to save
data to disk, which is (usually) OK.

Regards,

Brian


-- 
Brian G. Peterson
ph: +1.773.459.4973
im: bgpbraverock