From tlumley at u.washington.edu  Mon Jan 14 17:23:56 2008
From: tlumley at u.washington.edu (Thomas Lumley)
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:23:56 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Rd] Possible bug in R 2.6.1 (PR#10565)
In-Reply-To: <20080114154513.GA15372@phenix.progiciels-bpi.ca>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.43.0801140823560.16045@hymn14.u.washington.edu>

On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, [iso-8859-1] Fran?ois Pinard wrote:

> [Brian Ripley]
>
>> I do often wonder why people are 'sure you know for certain' (to quote the
>> FAQ) that something as elementary as this would be a bug for so many
>> years.  It indicates a lack of respect for the R developers.
>
> Not at all.  A bug report may be naive, or even wrong, and still be
> driven by good will, and be rightly interpreted as an attempt at
> a contribution to both the R community and R developers.
>

Brian's point is that there is an *explicit* request (in both the posting guide and the FAQ) not to send things to R-bugs unless you are *sure* they are bugs.  Queries about *possible* bugs are welcome on r-devel or r-help as appropriate.

Someone who sends a query about a possible bug to r-bugs has either not read the posting guide or has chosen to ignore the request. It is possible that the request in the posting guide is not sufficiently clear and they just misunderstand it, but I haven't seen anyone claim this. If that's what you mean, then suggestions for making it clearer would be considered.

If someone presents code  on r-help or r-devel that produces behaviour they don't understand and asks if it is bug (rather than asserting that it must be a bug) they have a much higher chance of receiving a friendly reply [and an even higher chance of receiving a helpful reply]


    -thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle



[Rd] Possible bug in R 2.6.1 (PR#10565)
Thomas Lumley