where to send patches to R source code

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.

- 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. For me these are
pretty significant bugs. 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...

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

--
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