[Rd] where to send patches to R source code

Fri May 13 10:49:26 CEST 2016

>>>>>   <frederik at 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 <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
    >> > 
    >> >>>>>>  <frederik at 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 at 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.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
    >> 
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