R-developers:
Duncan Murdoch suggested I move a post I started on r-help over here,
since it is more at the developer level. Here is my
question/challenge -- to my knowledge, there is not currently an
official way to store a *package*'s options to a standardized location
on a user's computer. Given that OS-level programs have standard
preference locations, I was hoping to first assess:
- Does R, in fact, have a place for a *package* to store preferences
(a file-based "setOptions") that would be persistent across sessions.
One suggestion that was given was to perhaps write these options to
the .RProfile, but this strikes me as potentially dangerous -- a
poorly written function to write to a user's .RProfile could corrupt
it.
If the answer to the initial question is "no" (there is not an
official location/approach for a package to store its own files), I'd
like to suggest we open this for a wider discussion amongst the
developers, to perhaps come up with a general (not package-by-package)
solution for a package to store options (and perhaps other files) in a
standard location.
The particular application that has brought me to asking about this is
that I'm writing a package that has external calls to command-line
programs that may not be properly registered with a user's environment
(think: Windows, in particular, although I've found issues with a Mac
as well), so the first step of these R - wrapper functions is to
search a user's local machine for the binaries. If it finds it, it
stores the path to this binary as an option. Since this is a
brute-force search, this can take some time and, ideally, this
information would be preserved across sessions, without the function
having to re-search their drive every time they start R fresh.