[Rd] R-bugs e-mail problems {was "sapply(Date, is.numeric)"}

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "RobMcG" == McGehee, Robert <Robert.McGehee at geodecapital.com>
>>>>>     on Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:40:37 -0400 writes:

    RobMcG> FYI, 
    RobMcG> I've tried posting the below message twice to the bug tracking system,
    RobMcG> once by email (below), and the second time 5 days later directly to the
    RobMcG> bugs.r-project.org website. As far as I can tell, the bug tracking
    RobMcG> system hasn't picked this up. Also it looks like the latest "incoming"
    RobMcG> bug is dated 25 May 2008, so perhaps others are having difficulty as
    RobMcG> well. (cc: r-bugs)

Well, if you look into the *trashcan*, you find the latest ones
to be from  'July 4' , (and it may well have been who cleaned up
the incoming mess, moving 95% of the messages to the trashcan);
so the mail-interface seemed to have stopped at the US national
holiday.

Given how ineffective our spam filters have become there,
it may not be a big harm  :-)

There have plans for a long time to change to a new bug report
system (probably with*out* e-mail interface - alas!),
but there have been diverse reasons why this has never happened.
One of the reasons: We'd want to migrate the current repository
(all the "bug - fix threads", apart from the trashcan) to the
new system, and I think haven't found anyone to do that for us.

We had even considered the R foundation would offer a monetary
amount to someone (smart programmer) to program the one-time
migration, but that somehow failed, too?
I'm getting really off-topic,
but this my be worthwhile theme to open just before meeting many
at the useR!2008 in Dortmund.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich and R-Core