[Rd] CRAN policies

[Hadley Wickham]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:52 AM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> CRAN has for some time had a policies page at
> http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html
> and we would like to draw this to the attention of package maintainers.  In
> particular, please

Thanks for the pointer - I did not know that this page existed. In
general, is there some easy way to track changes to this page and the
R extension manual over time?  It is difficult to keep track of the
best practices.

I'd also like to get clarification on "Packages should not write in
the users' home filespace, 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)." - what is recommended practice for packages to maintain state
across instances?  Operating systems have standards for where
applications can store settings (e.g. as described in
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/appdirs/1.2.0).  Is it acceptable to for
packages to follow these conventions?

Hadley

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/