[R-pkg-devel] R package which creates a directory in the user home dir
On Thu, 2019-10-17 at 14:29 +0200, Sigbert Klinke wrote:
Hi, I'am developing a package that circumvents the R package size limitation for data sets. For this I store the data set in the internet (currently GitHub) and download if it is requested. To avoid unnecessary downloads and internet connections I create a directory in the users home directory to store the data there. However, this violates the "CRAN Repository Policy" which says - Packages should not write in the user?s home filespace (including clipboards), 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). Do I have any chance to get the package to CRAN, if I submit it?
To be sure, you'd need to ask the CRAN staff, but probably not. You could probably add an option that defaults to FALSE to persist the data. Then wrap that in a check. if persist=TRUE, check to see if the file exists. if it exists in the subdirectory of the working directory, then load it. otherwise create the subdirectory of the current working directory, load from the internet, and save the data locally. In this way you've had the user explicitly direct the function to save data to disk, which is (usually) OK. Regards, Brian
Brian G. Peterson ph: +1.773.459.4973 im: bgpbraverock