From edd at debian.org  Fri Feb 12 16:29:18 2010
From: edd at debian.org (Dirk Eddelbuettel)
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:29:18 -0600
Subject: [Rd] R Startup configuration file
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On 12 February 2010 at 09:22, Simon Urbanek wrote:
| On Feb 12, 2010, at 3:50 , Barry Rowlingson wrote:
| 
| > On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Barry Rowlingson
| > <b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
| >
| >>  But I agree that writing a saveable options package is the first  
| >> step
| >> - then making that a default in R is the second so people don't have
| >> to edit profiles and R packages and applications can expect an API  
| >> for
| >> savable state.
| >
| > More thinking about this has turned it into a problem of being able
| > to serialize R objects to XML.
| 
| 
| This is getting OT, but, please, no XML. It's entirely useless in this  
| context IMHO (as it is in others, but that's another story) and we  
| already have reliable support for storing R objects (more than one in  
| fact). Despite the fact that some used to claim human readability of  
| XML in practice it turns out to be false, so I don't see any real  
| benefits of XML in this context.

Fully agreed.

OTOH I had the same idea as Barry the other day about maybe making files like
$R_HOME/profile.site 'walk' over a directory, say, $R_HOME/profile.site.d/ so
that users could drop files there and upon installation and re-installation
those user-contributed snippets would just survive.  This foo.d/ directory
scheme is getting more and more common in Unix/Linux land as Barry noted.

Dirk

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[Rd] R Startup configuration file
Dirk Eddelbuettel