[Rd] Base R examples that write to current working directory

Uwe Ligges
Fri, 30 Mar 2018 16:25:19 -0000

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
>