Patch idea: an environment variable for setting the user ID

Another thing to consider if one wants to anonymize the build is the
UID/GID of the files in the tarball.  So there might be a need for a
R_BUILD_UID and R_BUILD_GID, e.g. by setting those to 32767
("nobody").

/Henrik

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 9:25 AM Will L <will.landau at gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks, Kurt.

I think I now have enough time to write a patch. What are the steps? I have
read https://www.r-project.org/bugs.html#how-to-submit-patches but I do not
seem to have permission to create a Bugzilla account at
https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/.

Will


On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 2:46 AM Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu.ac.at> wrote:

Will L writes:

To R-devel,
In `R CMD build`, the ID of the user is automatically inserted into the
DESCRIPTION file, e.g.

Packaged: 2018-11-06 14:01:50 UTC; <MY USER ID>

This is problematic for those of us who work in corporate settings. We

must

not divulge our user IDs in the packages we develop and release.

Jim Hester pointed out that these two lines in
`add_build_stamp_to_description_file()`
<

https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/521c90a175d67475b9f1b43d7ae68bc48062d8e6/src/library/tools/R/build.R#L170-L171

are responsible. Could we consider his suggestion of using an optional
environment variable to overwrite the default behavior?

user <- Sys.getenv("R_BUILD_USERNAME")
if (!nzchar(user)) user <- Sys.info()["user"]
if(user == "unknown") user <- Sys.getenv("LOGNAME")

Yep, something along these lines should be possible.
R_BUILD_USER or R_BUILD_LOGNAME may seem more natural though ...

Best
-k

Will Landau
--
wlandau.github.io
linkedin.com/in/wlandau
github.com/wlandau

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linkedin.com/in/wlandau
github.com/wlandau

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