Duncan has echoed my thoughts. Just to add: Windows users also need
to monitor the CHANGES file (also available on an RSS feed).
The things that we find hardest to check by automated testing are the
installation process and GUI elements: we do only minimal testing in
languages other English: Windows users routinely using test versions
in the DBCS languages (Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional
Chinese) would be particularly beneficial, but so too would users of
European languages on any platform.
E.g. it needs no special skills to notice that the installer gave you
text help when you asked for HTML help. Yet no one reported it until
after release.
On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 11/3/2009 9:49 AM, Michael Dewey wrote:
At 10:02 03/11/2009, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
Comment in line below
Duncan gave the definitive answer in an earlier reply: the active R
developers are no longer willing to support CHM help. It is not open for
discussion, period.
But three comments to ponder (but not discuss).
(a) CHM is unusable for many of us. A year or two ago Microsoft disabled
it on non-local drives via a Windows patch because of security risks --
overnight it simply failed to work (no error, no warning, just no
response) in our computer labs. And this year CERT issued a serious
advisory on the CHM compiler that Microsoft has not fixed (and apparently
is not going to) -- so many of us are banned from having it on a networked
machine by company policy.
(b) CHM support was in the sources at the beginning of the 2.10.0 alpha
testing. Not one user asked for it at that point, let alone compiled it
up and tested it. Since no one asked for it (not what we had
anticipated), the sources were cleaned up.
The main consultation over R development is the making available of
development versions for users to test out.
(c) We did ask for support for cross-compliation before removing it
(https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-January/051864.html): no one
responded but two shameless users months later whinged about its removal
on this list. That has left a sour taste and zero enthusiasm for
supporting things that no one is prepared even to write in about when
asked. Ask not what the R developers can do for you, but what you can do
for R development (and faithful alpha/beta testing would be a start).
What would be involved in testing such versions? Do you want people who are
just regular users with limited computing skills like me, or users living
on the cutting edge of computational statistics?
I don't know what Brian would say, but I would like to see both of the above
groups testing, and familiar with the changes that are coming. All you need
to do is to download and install a test version and see if anything goes
wrong on your system.
At what
stage in the process do pre-compiled versions (for Windows) come in? Is
there somewhere I should have looked this up?
There are announcements in the r-announce group when alpha or beta versions
are about to be released, but you can download the r-devel builds any time to
see what sort of things are going on, or subscribe to the RSS feed of NEWS
changes to it.
The main problem with watching R-devel is that often it contains incomplete
code, and some decisions aren't finalized until the end of the alpha testing
period. So please don't report things as bugs or expect everything to be in
its final state, but do point out things that are causing problems.
Duncan Murdoch
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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