On 24/06/2014, 10:26 PM, Radford Neal wrote: >> Duncan Murdoch: >> >> No, I don't think it's reasonable to expect you to write a patch, but >> reporting the bugs in the R bug reporting system isn't that hard to do, >> and does lead to fixes pretty rapidly in cases where the report contains >> sample code to reproduce the problem. > > Sometimes. Sometimes not. For instance, PR #14985, a significant set > of bugs, with an easy fix (patch provided), which took almost two > years to make it to an R Core release - perhaps because you were more > interested in trying to argue that they weren't really bugs at all...
I've just re-read that thread (and I'd invite anyone else to do so, it's at https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14985), and I don't think that's a completely fair characterization of it. That was a case where problems did sit around for about a year before being dealt with, but since it was a change to the interface that could affect third party front-ends, I didn't put it into R-patched right away, which means it waited most of another year before making it into a release. > >> "Fixed a problem in R_AllocStringBuffer that could result in a crash due >> to an invalid memory access" sounds serious, but is just too vague to >> follow up. I would expect that doing a diff on the source files is >> going to find all sorts of stuff: pqR isn't just R with bugs fixed, it >> has a lot of other changes too. > > You might expect that if it was really that difficult, I would have > given more detail. I think if you actually looked at this procedure, > which is about 30 lines long, you might, seeing as you've been warned > that it has a bug, find the problem in about 30 seconds, even without > looking at the pqR source code, which of course isn't difficult to do. I think it's fixed now. > >> it would be more >> helpful to the community if the bugs actually got fixed. > > Indeed. > >> I think all of >> the bugs that you reported last June got fixed within a couple of weeks > > Actually, the last six in the list I just posted are from the original > pqR release last June. Some of the six don't seem too crucial, but > two of them seem reasonably serious (one leads to R crashing). I imagine the reason they weren't dealt with was because we mistakenly thought they had been. Duncan Murdoch > >> Why not report them >> more frequently than annually, and give the details you already have so >> they are easier to fix? > > I did report at least one bug not long ago (which got fixed), after > seeing (as now) that an R Core release was imminent, and therefore > thinking it would be best if a fix was put in before it went out. > > You're of course welcome to look at the NEWS file at pqR-project.org > whenever you like. > > Radford Neal > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
