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Bug reporting system inquiry plus a bug report related to sort

8 messages · Tom Short, Marc Schwartz, Jens Elkner +2 more

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Is the bug-reporting system working okay? Two days ago, I submitted
the following bug report via email to r-bugs at r-project.org. I didn't
see a confirmation, and it didn't see it at
http://bugs.r-project.org/. Now, http://bugs.r-project.org/ seems to
be down.

Anyway, here's the bug report related to sort.list and sort(...,
index.return = TRUE) with na.last = NA


I think that both sort.list(x, na.last = NA) and sort(x, na.last = NA,
index.return = TRUE)$ix give incorrect answers with na.last. With
na.last, both of these return answers equivalent to
sort.list(na.omit(x)), and I think they should be the equivalent of
order(x, na.last=NA) as follows.
[1] 1 4 2
[1] 1 3 2
[1] 1 3 2
[1] 1 3 2

I've included a patch for the "radix" and "shell" methods of
sort.list. The sort and "quick" method of sort.list (which uses sort)
look more challenging. With the patch, I get:
[1] 1 4 2
[1] 1 4 2
[1] 1 3 2

By the way, having the radix sort is great. It's really fast for factors.

- Tom

Tom Short
Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)
R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
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On Mar 4, 2010, at 9:29 AM, Tom Short wrote:

            
Tom, 

See this recent follow up posting from Peter:

  http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e9/devel/10/02/0375.html

There has been talk over the years of moving to Bugzilla, but I am not clear on present status.

Perhaps the link on the main R Project page needs to be removed or better, updated to a link with a status update on the R bug reporting process. Of course, that does not help folks using bug.report(), which presumably needs to be updated as well.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz
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On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 09:39:41AM -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote:

            
IMHO Bugzilla is too challenging for normal users/human beeings (even
developers are often not able to extract the info they need). So JIRA
(http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) might be a much better choice -
usually it is not a problem to ask for and get a license for free for
OpenSource projects ...

Regards,
jel.
#
On Mar 4, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Jens Elkner wrote:

            
Jira was discussed a couple of years ago:

  http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e5/devel/08/09/0006.html

I presume that the disposition towards non-FOSS platforms remains.

FWIW, the company that I work for uses Bugzilla (and SVN) on RHEL for our own internal development and bug/issue reporting processes. We have both clients and employees using our Bugzilla platform.

The key to having a successful result is not the software, but that the end users and developers can interact with a base of information that enables productive conversation. That places a certain burden on those reporting the bugs/issues to understand both when and how to report bugs, including providing sufficient information on the platform, versions, code and data to reliably reproduce the issue observed.

As we frequently see on both R-Help and R-Devel, in my mind, that is the limiting characteristic. With bug.report(), we still have issues and that is arguably independent of the host bug management system.

I would argue that if there was a somewhat bigger hurdle in place to bug reporting that compelled folks to post to R-Help first, before filing a formal bug report, that this would not be a bad outcome. Whatever the host system may be, a member of R Core will still need to manually process the report, adding to their overhead. Reducing the number of false positives would be helpful.

Marc
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Just to calm the discussion a bit - we already have decided to go with  
Bugzilla, we created tools for the import of old PRs and the new bug  
system is up and running in a test phase. The current downtime is not  
directly related to that - the cause is being investigated.

Cheers,
Simon
On Mar 4, 2010, at 11:58 , Marc Schwartz wrote:

            
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Thanks for the update and your work on this Simon.

Regards,

Marc
On Mar 4, 2010, at 11:36 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

            
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On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 10:58:16AM -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote:
...
Was just an idea. IMHO the hosting team needs to decide, what they
can accomplish/how many time they are able to invest to get that thing
driven/maintained/adjusted. Everybody else has to live with that decision
;-)
  
...
Exactly wrt. the last part. But often even developers just want to get
its work done, don't have the time to get trained to a more or less
complicated beast, have at least at the beginning no intention to extend
it and just want to have their "customers" report bugs/oddities in a 
usable style, which is a problem, if one presents an interface, which is
hard to use / use as intented because of the "none"-expert knowledge ...
So IMHO success certainly depends on the software, as long as you do not
have access limited to a [small] trained group ...
...
Hurdles wrt. SW dev and help are always bad. Thinking about how to make it
easier to find the required information/right direction is a good thing
...
...
Yes. So good/extensive documentation/examples is the? key for success ? ;-)

Regards,
jel.
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Yes,

The webserver had died of loneliness, apparently. The automounter had failed following a power outage on the file servers and the physical machine is in my old office, which I'm not. 

The machine is currently up and running again, but don't expect any great longevity, since the move to Bugzilla is imminent. 

This will have to involve a short gap in services because we have to take the old server down before we can put up the new one, or PR#s will overlap. This also includes the mail interface, so mails to R-bugs at r-project.org may bounce for a while, including followups on R-devel. The exact timing is yet to be decided.  

-pd
On Mar 4, 2010, at 6:47 PM, Marc Schwartz wrote:

            
Peter Dalgaard
pd.mes at cbs.dk