>>>>> <frede...@ofb.net>
>>>>> on Thu, 12 May 2016 15:23:04 -0700 writes:
> Hi Peter, Martin, and others,
> Thanks for your replies.
> - The bugs apply to all systems that use GNU Readline, not just Linux
> or Arch Linux.
yes... but
> - Readline version 6.3 changed the signal handling so that SIGWINCH is
> no longer handled automatically by the library. This means it's not
> currently possible for people using R on e.g. Linux to resize the
> terminal, or at least when they do so they have to make sure that
> all their commands fit in one line and don't wrap.
> - There is also a long-standing bug in Readline where the callback
> interface didn't properly clear the line on SIGINT (^C). This means
> that "exiting" reverse-incremental-search with ^C would give an
> apparently empty prompt which still had some pending input, so if
> you hit ^C-Return then an unintended command would get executed.
> If they're not "bothering all that many people", then perhaps it's
> because everyone uses Windows or Mac OS X or RStudio
or ESS [ := Emacs Speaks Statistics] https://ess.r-project.org/ ),
really the first cross platform UI, and the most used one by R
"gurus" for a long time...
or StatET (an Eclipse based GUI, also cross platform)
or ... {quite a few more}.
I'm pretty sure (but may be wrong) that 99% of useRs do not work
much with R in a readline-enabled console, but rather via
another interface.
Maybe only 95% if you restrict yourself to non-Mac, non-Windows
(i.e. typically Linux) users.
> For me these are pretty significant bugs.
I agree they should be fixed.. only just because regular bash
users may like the readline-enabled R in a terminal, and because
readline is nice in itself, and it'd be a pity if our using it
started to lag. ... or has started to lag, as you found..
> The second one causes unintended code to be
> executed. Random code could delete files, for example, or worse. The
> first one bites me every time I want to change the size of a window,
> which is pretty often.
> I tried to get Readline maintainer Chet Ramey to fix these on the
> Readline side, but he disagreed with my proposal:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-readline/2016-04/threads.html
> I'm glad that my message here at least was seen and I hope that
> someone who uses the R command line on Linux will have time to verify
> that the patches work correctly. They are basically Chet-approved
> workarounds for bugs/changes in Readline, not very complicated.
> Do either of you know a Linux R person you could ping to get these
> patches checked out? I'm not overly frustrated, and I'm not in a major
> hurry, but from what we've observed it seems like waiting for someone
> concerned to come along and finally read Bugzilla or the R-Devel
> archives is not going to result in a very dense Poisson process...
Well, many of us from R core use Linux regularly or at least occasionally and
hence can take time to confirm the bug ... and if the patch
seems to fix it.
However, most of experienced R users, not just R core,
"believes" in reproducibility and hence we want to work with *.R
scripts (or *.Rmd etc nowadays):
We had a saying in the ESS manuals for 20 years or so:
"The source code is real."
which had later been extended to
"The source code is real.
The objects are realizations of the source code."
As a consequence, we do not "work" in the R console; we may tinker
a bit for experiments, but we really work "in" the R source files.
For that reason, if apply your patches and quickly check that
the previous bug seems gone, I would not notice if the patch had
introduced new bugs ... just because I almost never work in
"readline-R" but always (99.9%) work in Linux.
Martin
> Thanks,
> Frederick Eaton
> On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 03:42:59PM +0200, peter dalgaard wrote:
>>
>> > On 12 May 2016, at 10:03 , Martin Maechler
<maech...@stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>> >
>> >>>>>> <frede...@ofb.net>
>> >>>>>> on Wed, 11 May 2016 23:00:20 -0700 writes:
>> >
>> >> Dear R Developers,
>> >> I wrote to this list a week ago with some patches that fix bugs in R's
>> >> GNU Readline interface, but I haven't had a reply. I'm not in a hurry
>> >> but I'd like to make sure that my message is getting read by the right
>> >> people. Should I be sending my patches somewhere else?
>> >
>> > Thank you Frederick for your reports and patches.
>> > You did send them to the correct place, https://bugs.r-project.org/
>> >
>> > Sometimes (as here) a combination of circumstances do lead to
>> > nobody picking them up quickly.
>> > In this case,
>> >
>> > - probably none of R-core use or even have easy access to Arch Linux
>> > so we cannot easily veryify that there is a bug at all
>> > nor -consequently- veryify that your patch does fix the bug.
>>
>> Actually, the bugs look like they should apply fairly generally, just
maybe not bothering all that many people. But there could be portability issues
with the fixes, so I suspect some of us were waiting for "a readline expert" to
check them out.
>>
>> -pd
>>
>> BTW: Anyone with a fix for the stuck-at-eol issue?
(aaa<right>bbb<left>ccc)
>>
>> >
>> > - no other user has confirmed the bug on his/her platform, so
>> > there did not seem a huge demand...
>> >
>> > - Accidentally many in R core may be busy with other bugs, teaching,
.....
>> > and just lack the extra resources to delve into these problems
>> > at the current moment.
>> >
>> > Hence, there was not even an 'Acknowledged' change to your
>> > reports--indeed as nobody had been able to see there is a problem
>> > existing outside of your personal computer.
>> >
>> > I agree that this must seem a bit frustrating to you.
>> >
>> > --
>> > Martin
>> >
>> > ______________________________________________
>> > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
>> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>> --
>> Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
>> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
>> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
>> Phone: (+45)38153501
>> Office: A 4.23
>> Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
