Dear useRs and expeRts, I would like to ask your views on an issue for which there possibly exists an established policy of the R-help list, but I am not aware of it.
In 2008, I have spotted some errors in a package, one which is likely to have many users (I am not one myself). The more serious errors are in the documentation, since they lead to a completely distorted interpretation of the outcome; in addition, there is (at least) one programming error which produces some wrong computations. A few weeks later, the maintainers of the package replied, with a promise to handle these issues. Today, I have looked at that package again, and everthing is as in 2008, as for the points raised then. There has been at least one update of that package, about one year after our e-mail exchange. When I discover a bug in a program of a colleague, I point out it by a private communication to the author. If the problem is of some relevance, I expect that the bug is fixed in a reasonable time. In the present case, this fix has not been provided after over 18 months, and potentially users keep producing nonsense out of that package. What is the appropriate way to proceed now? Announce these errors to the whole R-help list, or what else? I only rule out writing (again) to the maintainers of the package. Adelchi Azzalini -- Adelchi Azzalini <azzal...@stat.unipd.it> Dipart.Scienze Statistiche, Università di Padova, Italia tel. +39 049 8274147, http://azzalini.stat.unipd.it/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
