[Rd] [R] "Error: bad value" problem

[Martyn Plummer]

On Thu, 2008-12-18 at 10:57 +0100, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> Martyn Plummer wrote:
> > This has all the hallmarks of a bug I found and fixed in R-devel
> > (r46998).  I did not port the patch over to the R release branch because
> > I could not reproduce the bug.
> > 
> > In R-devel, I was seeing problems with "make test-Segfault". This would
> > occasionally segfault, but most of the time would create the "bad value"
> > error, and of course would also run perfectly fine a lot of the time.
> > The error came from exactly the same place that Ben found.  It was due
> > to an invalid SrcRefs being used because SrcFile is not set to zero when
> > it should be.
> > 
> > I'll have a look and see if it is the same problem, or a close cousin.
> 
> Yes, this does appear to fix the issue. (Did you forget a NEWS file 
> entry, though?)

You mean this?

* Fixed obscure, poorly reproducible bug that nobody else has reported.

Anyway, it's the same bug. There is a call to parse() in plot.mmfit()
which generates a parse error.  This has been wrapped in a silent call
to try, so you never see the error message:

Error in parse(text = colnames(z)[seq(1, 2 * np, 2)]) : 
  unexpected numeric constant in "Parameter 1"

This error leaves the parser in a bad state.

> It's a two-line change fixing a live bug, so it could go in 2.8.1 even 
> in code freeze. The problem is that it is inside gram.y which will 
> trigger some maintainer-mode activity, and did trip up my Fedora laptop 
> slightly. Hmmmm....
> 
> 	-p

Fedora 10 certainly won't let me do a maintainer mode build.  I leave it
in your hands.

M.

> > Martyn
> > 
> > 
> > On Wed, 2008-12-17 at 22:07 -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> >> On 17/12/2008 9:47 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> >>> On 17/12/2008 8:56 PM, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> >>>> Ben Bolker wrote:
> >>>>>   I can get the errors to happen on Ubuntu 8.10 with R --vanilla (*without*
> >>>>> valgrind) -- but
> >>>>> editing momfit.r line 742 so that plot.progress=FALSE seems to make the
> >>>>> problem go away.  (This was a lucky guess, it looked like there was
> >>>>> something
> >>>>> odd going on with the plots.)
> >>>>>
> >>>>>   Hope that helps someone ...
> >>>> Probably not. The problem is to reproduce the error state in a way so 
> >>>> that we can understand what is causing it.
> >>>>
> >>>> I can debug this to
> >>>> (gdb) bt
> >>>> #0  Rf_error (format=0x8220c65 "bad value") at 
> >>>> ../../../R/src/main/errors.c:704
> >>>> #1  0x0805a924 in SETCDR (x=0x8f89348, y=0x9b276e8)
> >>>>      at ../../../R/src/main/memory.c:2728
> >>>> #2  0x0819fa46 in GrowList (l=0x951e8f4, s=<value optimized out>) at 
> >>>> gram.y:958
> >>>> #3  0x081a2a7b in xxvalue (v=0x8f89348, k=4, lloc=<value optimized out>)
> >>>>      at gram.y:440
> >>>>
> >>>> and the problem in GrowList is that CAR(l) is R_NilValue (==0x8f89348), 
> >>>> which supposedly "cannot happen", and the thing that calls GrowList is 
> >>>> something with srcrefs (DuncanM?).
> >>>>
> >>>> Digging deeper probably has to wait till the weekend for my part. (The 
> >>>> natural next step is figuring out how the R_NilValue got into that 
> >>>> location, but I should try to sleep off this cold....)
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm CCing r-devel on this. Can we move the discussion there?
> >>> I can probably take a look tomorrow.  I wasn't getting an error, but 
> >>> maybe I'll see the same corruption if I watch it run.
> >> I had time to see if I was getting a NilValue there tonight, and the 
> >> answer was no, with the Windows RC.  I don't get the error in any 
> >> version I've tried on Windows, though I can see it in 2.8.0 on MacOSX.
> >>
> >> Duncan
> >>> Duncan Murdoch
> >>>
> >>>>
> >>>>>   Ben Bolker
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> sessionInfo()
> >>>>> R version 2.8.0 (2008-10-20) 
> >>>>> i486-pc-linux-gnu 
> >>>>>
> >>>>> locale:
> >>>>> LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=C;LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
> >>>>>
> >>>>> attached base packages:
> >>>>> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base    
> >>> ______________________________________________
> >>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >> ______________________________________________
> >> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> >> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> > 
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