From maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch  Wed Mar 16 11:35:04 2016
From: maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch (Martin Maechler)
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2016 11:35:04 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Regression in strptime
In-Reply-To: <56E8CA08.6080301@oracle.com>
References: <56E34F4E.30006@oracle.com>
	<7CB65C37-52E1-48E4-9AF9-83FE0BAEFCC8@gmail.com>
	<56E4471B.6020001@oracle.com>
	<EE281D98-018A-496B-B851-3C89D59BF540@gmail.com>
	<22247.59766.215169.312799@stat.math.ethz.ch>
	<56E8CA08.6080301@oracle.com>
Message-ID: <22249.14040.401149.819154@stat.math.ethz.ch>

>>>>> Mick Jordan <mick.jordan at oracle.com>
>>>>>     on Tue, 15 Mar 2016 19:50:48 -0700 writes:

    > On 3/15/16 3:52 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:
    >>>>>>> peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com>
    >>>>>>> on Sat, 12 Mar 2016 19:11:40 +0100 writes:
    >> > OK, .Internal is not necessary to reproduce oddity in this area. I also see things like (notice 1980)
    >> >> strptime(paste0(sample(1900:1999,80,replace=TRUE),"/01/01"), "%Y/%m/%d", tz="CET")
    >> ...............
    >> 
    >> > The issue seems to be present in R-devel but not in (CRAN) 3.2.0
    >> 
    >> nor in R 3.2.3 (and earlier), but indeed unfortunately in 3.2.4.
    >> 
    >> This has been fixed now in  "R 3.2.4 patched"  (and R-devel of course).
    >> Thank you Mick, for the report...
    >> ...
    >> ...
    >> though I "must" add: If you do have your own tests / checks (as
    >> you said in the OP) and are company as big as Oracle using the
    >> free (in the full sense of "speech" *and* "beer") software R,
    >> it would be *really* *really* courteous if you did run your test
    >> suite when we announce and release betas or release candidates
    >> ("RC") (and in the case of the upcoming yearly release in April,
    >> even "alphas" before them) so we, the R community and the R core
    >> developers could find bugs *before* release.
    >> 
    >> 
    > Following up on Lukas's explanatory message, we will try to sync up with 
    > R releases on a more regular schedule from now on, even if we don't 
    > actually push FastR based on that version. So we should discover test 
    > regressions earlier.

Thank you, Mick and Lukas, in advance!

Note that my "admonition"  was not at all aimed at you /
Oracle in particular, but rather to the general (advanced, as in
"R-devel") R public: 

Free Software projects such as R have traditionally very much
profited from volunteer beta testers, and we, R core, are trying
to get more beta testers (on an informal basis, still) than we
currently seem to have.

Best regards,
Martin Maechler



[Rd] Regression in strptime
Martin Maechler