[Rd] Problem compiling R patched and R devel on Ubuntu

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Berwin A Turlach <berwin.turlach at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Thu, 3 Aug 2017 15:27:56 +0800 writes:

    > G'day all,
    > since about a week my daily re-compilations of R patched and R devel
    > are falling over, i.e. they stop with an error during "make
    > check" (while building the 32 bit architecture) on my Ubuntu 16.04.3
    > LTS machine.
    
Dear Berwin,

thanks a lot for the report!

    >  Specifically, a test in graphics-Ex.R seems to fail and
    > the last lines of graphics-ex.Rout.fail are:

    >> ## Extreme outliers; the "FD" rule would take very large number of
    > 'breaks': 
    >> XXL <- c(1:9, c(-1,1)*1e300)
    >> hh <- hist(XXL, "FD") # did not work in R <= 3.4.1; now gives
    > warning 
    > Warning in hist.default(XXL, "FD") :
    > 'breaks = 4.44796e+299' is too large and set to 1e9
    > Error in pretty.default(range(x), n = breaks, min.n = 1) : 
    > cannot allocate vector of length 1000000001
    > Calls: hist -> hist.default -> pretty -> pretty.default
    > Execution halted

    > My R 3.4.1 installation, the last R patched version that I could
    > compile (R version 3.4.1 Patched (2017-07-26 r72974)) and the last R
    > devel version that I could compile (R Under development (unstable)
    > (2017-07-26 r72974)) 

  ((well, well ... you could also compile later versions.  It was
    "only"  'make check' that failed ..))

    > give the following results (under the 32bit architecture
    > and the 64bit architecture): 

    >> XXL <- c(1:9, c(-1,1)*1e300)
    >> hh <- hist(XXL, "FD")
    > Error in pretty.default(range(x), n = breaks, min.n = 1) : 
    > invalid 'n' argument
    > In addition: Warning message:
    > In pretty.default(range(x), n = breaks, min.n = 1) :
    > NAs introduced by coercion to integer range

  [yes, that was the bug; see below]

    > Not sure if this is a general problem, or only a problem on my machine.

It is not a problem on 64-bit I think.  This is related to the
bug and bugfix  for PR#17274 
   ( https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17274 )
which I had handled.

Now I see the above, I can well imagine that I had made
assumptions that only worked on my (64-bit) platform.
I'll have a look and will amend the bug fix to also work on
"smaller" platforms - hopefully today.

Martin