Lintr searches for settings for a given source file in the following order:
options defined as linter.setting.
linter_file in the same directory
linter_file in the project directory
linter_file in the user home directory
default_settings()
read_settings(filename)source file to be linted
The default linter_file name is .lintr but it can be changed with option lintr.linter_file
or the environment variable R_LINTR_LINTER_FILE
This file is a DCF file, see base::read.dcf() for details.
Experimentally, we also support keeping the config in a plain R file. By default we look for
a file named '.lintr.R' (in the same directories where we search for '.lintr').
We are still deciding the future of config support in lintr, so user feedback is welcome.
The advantage of R is that it maps more closely to how the configs are actually stored,
whereas the DCF approach requires somewhat awkward formatting of parseable R code within
valid DCF key-value pairs. The main disadvantage of the R file is it might be too flexible,
with users tempted to write configs with side effects causing hard-to-detect bugs or
like YAML could work, but require new dependencies and are harder to parse
both programmatically and visually.