From radford at cs.toronto.edu  Tue Jun 24 22:26:35 2014
From: radford at cs.toronto.edu (Radford Neal)
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 16:26:35 -0400
Subject: [Rd] Unfixed bugs in latest R-patched
In-Reply-To: <53A97E74.1050107@gmail.com>
References: <20140623152435.GA22211@cs.toronto.edu>
	<53A926BE.4030205@gmail.com>
	<20140624114005.GA10010@cs.toronto.edu>
	<53A97E74.1050107@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20140624202635.GA6619@cs.toronto.edu>

> 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...

> "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.

> 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).

> 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



[Rd] Unfixed bugs in latest R-patched
Radford Neal