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Invitation to Try My R Package: bughunter

4 messages · Jiefei Wang, Bert Gunter, Martin Maechler +1 more

Original
Jiefei Wang
# 
Hi everyone,

I'd like to invite you to try my new R package,
[bughunter](https://github.com/Jiefei-Wang/bughunter), which I believe
could be extremely useful for this mailing list.

For a long time, I've noticed that many people struggle to describe
their bugs clearly when asking for help. One major reason is that we
lack an easy way to share the full debugging context, typically, only
the surface-level code can be shared, not the call frames or stack
information. This makes reproducing someone else's problem quite
painful.

The idea behind bughunter is to solve this pain point. It
automatically saves the call frames and code into a single object when
an error occurs. This object can then be saved and shared with others.
Moreover, the package provides a user-friendly Shiny interface for
debugging, designed to look and feel similar to RStudio - there's
virtually no learning curve.

The package is still in its early development phase, so any feedback
or suggestions are very welcome. I'm also exploring options for a free
cloud platform to host and share these R objects so that users won?t
need to email them manually. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear
them.

Best regards,
Jiefei
Bert Gunter
# 
I think you should post this on the R-packages mailing list, here
<https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-packages> , if you haven't already
done so.

-- Bert
On Sun, Oct 26, 2025 at 4:40?PM Jiefei Wang <szwjf08 at gmail.com> wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

        

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Martin Maechler
    

    

      
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> I think you should post this on the R-packages mailing list, here
    > <https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-packages> , if you haven't already
    > done so.

    > -- Bert

Indeed.  But the package should have become a CRAN package, too.
Why should I try packages that don't even fulfill simple QA
criteria such as those from CRAN  (or - somewhat different ones
- from Bioconductor).

Martin

        
> On Sun, Oct 26, 2025 at 4:40?PM Jiefei Wang <szwjf08 at gmail.com> wrote:

        
>> Hi everyone,
    >> 
    >> I'd like to invite you to try my new R package,
    >> [bughunter](https://github.com/Jiefei-Wang/bughunter), which I believe
    >> could be extremely useful for this mailing list.
    >> 
    >> For a long time, I've noticed that many people struggle to describe
    >> their bugs clearly when asking for help. One major reason is that we
    >> lack an easy way to share the full debugging context, typically, only
    >> the surface-level code can be shared, not the call frames or stack
    >> information. This makes reproducing someone else's problem quite
    >> painful.
    >> 
    >> The idea behind bughunter is to solve this pain point. It
    >> automatically saves the call frames and code into a single object when
    >> an error occurs. This object can then be saved and shared with others.
    >> Moreover, the package provides a user-friendly Shiny interface for
    >> debugging, designed to look and feel similar to RStudio - there's
    >> virtually no learning curve.
    >> 
    >> The package is still in its early development phase, so any feedback
    >> or suggestions are very welcome. I'm also exploring options for a free
    >> cloud platform to host and share these R objects so that users won?t
    >> need to email them manually. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear
    >> them.
    >> 
    >> Best regards,
    >> Jiefei
    >> 
    >> ______________________________________________
    >> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
    >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
    >> PLEASE do read the posting guide
    >> https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
    >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
    >> 

    > [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

    > ______________________________________________
    > R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
    > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
    > PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
    > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Spencer Graves
    

    

      
      #
    

  


  

      
Hi, Jiefei:


What have you done to seen input from the tidyverse team[1] and Jenny 
Bryan <jenny at rstudio.com> and / or Hadley Wickham in particular? Also, 
to what's your familiarity with Wickham and Bryan, R Packages?[2]


In particular, I notice that your package does NOT include


* a "tests" directory containing unit tests, which they recommend.


* GitHub actions, which, e.g., run R CMD check on your package on 5 
different platforms ("r release" on Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu plus "r 
devel" and "r oldrel1" on Ubuntu).


I found both of these things to be quite useful, and the R Studio team 
is a leading center of research on things like this.


hope this helps. spencer graves


[1] GitHub: tidyverse


https://github.com/tidyverse


[2] R Packages (2e), Hadley Wickham and Jennifer Bryan


https://r-pkgs.org/

        
On 10/27/25 04:30, Martin Maechler wrote: