[Rd] CRAN policies

[Uwe Ligges]

On 28.03.2012 00:07, Hadley Wickham wrote:
> 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?


The policy is meant not to overwrite user data or generate loads of 
temporary files from examples and pollute, e.g., the owkring directory.

Uwe Ligges




> Hadley
>