R devel - Mar 2018 - Base R examples that write to current working directory

Hi all,

Given the recent CRAN push to prevent examples writing to the working
directory, is there any interest in fixing base R examples that write
to the working directory? A few candidates are the graphics devices,
file.create(), writeBin(), writeChar(), write(), and saveRDS(). I'm
sure there are many more.

One way to catch these naughty examples would be to search for
unlink() in examples: e.g.,
https://github.com/wch/r-source/search?utf8=?&q=unlink+extension%3ARd&type=.
Of course, simply cleaning up after yourself is not sufficient because
if those files existed before the examples were run, the examples will
destroy them.

Hadley

-- 
http://hadley.nz

On 29/03/2018 5:23 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Given the recent CRAN push to prevent examples writing to the working
> directory, is there any interest in fixing base R examples that write
> to the working directory? A few candidates are the graphics devices,
> file.create(), writeBin(), writeChar(), write(), and saveRDS(). I'm
> sure there are many more.
> 
> One way to catch these naughty examples would be to search for
> unlink() in examples: e.g.,
>
https://github.com/wch/r-source/search?utf8=?&q=unlink+extension%3ARd&type=.
> Of course, simply cleaning up after yourself is not sufficient because
> if those files existed before the examples were run, the examples will
> destroy them.
> 
Why not put together a patch that fixes these?  This doesn't seem to be 
something that needs discussion, fixing the bad examples would be a good 
idea.

Duncan Murdoch

On 30.03.2018 00:08, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 29/03/2018 5:23 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Given the recent CRAN push to prevent examples writing to the working
>> directory, is there any interest in fixing base R examples that write
>> to the working directory? A few candidates are the graphics devices,
>> file.create(), writeBin(), writeChar(), write(), and saveRDS(). I'm
>> sure there are many more.
>>
>> One way to catch these naughty examples would be to search for
>> unlink() in examples: e.g.,
>>
https://github.com/wch/r-source/search?utf8=?&q=unlink+extension%3ARd&type=.
>>
>> Of course, simply cleaning up after yourself is not sufficient because
>> if those files existed before the examples were run, the examples will
>> destroy them.
>>
> 
> Why not put together a patch that fixes these?? This doesn't seem to be
> something that needs discussion, fixing the bad examples would be a good 
> idea.
Seconded. CRAN would not accept these base packages, hence we should 
urgently give better examples.

Best,
Uwe

> Duncan Murdoch
> 
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