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R != S-Plus

3 messages · Marc Feldesman, A.J. Rossini, Paul Gilbert

Original
Marc Feldesman
# 
David Brahm's initial post seems to me to be filled with a mixture of bugs, 
wants, and needs coupled with a desire to "make" R become S-Plus.  David, 
if S-Plus works for you, why are you bothering to convert all your code to 
R?  No one has ever asserted that R==S (or S-Plus), and there is no reason 
to expect this equality to hold, ever.

R is open source.  If you want to change something, you are free to change 
it and you are free to contribute your changes to the community.  If you 
want to find and fix a bug, I'm sure the r-development team would welcome 
your assistance.  (BTW, it has never been difficult for me to figure out 
how or where to report problems and concerns.  Indeed it isn't in the FAQs 
- and maybe it should - but anyone with a reasonable amount of 
inquisitiveness could figure it out.)

Yelling at the developers is a no win strategy.  They're not obliged to do 
anything, including fixing bugs.  They do it voluntarily and most of us 
genuinely appreciate the incredibly hard work they do.  I'm not an 
R-developer -- just a very grateful consumer -- but my standard response to 
ungrateful people is to do less for them, not more.

Peter's response may have seemed "unfair", but it was needed IMHO.

My 2 cents.









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A.J. Rossini
# 
MF> David Brahm's initial post seems to me to be filled with a
    MF> mixture of bugs, wants, and needs coupled with a desire to
    MF> "make" R become S-Plus.  David, if S-Plus works for you, why
    MF> are you bothering to convert all your code to R?  No one has
    MF> ever asserted that R==S (or S-Plus), and there is no reason to
    MF> expect this equality to hold, ever.

I think I'd disagree.  David's post was fine.  It was a nice detailed
explanation of his user experiences, something nearly every open
source development team wants.  In other contexts/projects, I've
really appreciated his reports and some of his provided solutions.

The only major problem I can see is that he sent it to R-bugs,
creating a minor (major?) workload problem for Peter which shouldn't
have happened.

Something broke down in the development process.  Let's get it fixed.

Civility is important from EVERYBODY.  

Relax.  As Thomas' subject said, take a deep breath and count to 10.

However, this isn't the first time we've seen comments about "open
source, volunteers, blah, blah" bandied around at people who have
demonstrated willingness to help OSS projects in the past, or worse,
who have run OSS projects in the past (not in this case, but I do
recall a snide remark from someone who should've known better about
OSS volunteer projects, directed towards the developer of the slick
(GPL'd) Emacs SAS mode predating ESS (which we later incorporated)).

best,
-tony
Paul Gilbert
# 
shouldn't
fixed.

I'm not sure what the fix should be but I have erred on both
sides of the problem.
On occassion I have reported to r-bugs something that really was
not a bug. More often I have reported something to r-devel that I
think may be a bug, but not sent it to r-bugs because I was not
sure, and then it got forgotten and never filed on r-bugs.
Perhaps a solution would be to have someone approve messages to
r-bugs so there is at least a rough scan first. (Since there are
so few bugs in R there really is not much traffic on r-bugs.)

Paul Gilbert

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