[Rd] seek() and gzfile() on 32-bit R2.12.0 in linux

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "BW" == Brandon Whitcher <bwhitcher at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:14:35 +0100 writes:

    BW> Peter, thanks for your comments.  The reason I have taken this issue
    BW> to R-devel is from the advice of Kurt Hornik.  An update to my package
    BW> oro.nifti is being refused by CRAN because it fails on the
    BW> _development_ version of R on 32-bit linux.  As we have just discussed
    BW> (and thanks to Matt's input), the problem is not with my package but
    BW> with the development version of R.  Hence, I wanted to alert to the R
    BW> Core Development Team that the _unstable_ version of R appears to have
    BW> a problem.

    BW> Obviously, I would prefer to have my new version of oro.nifti accepted
    BW> by CRAN... but at the moment I am in between a rock and a hard place.
    BW> I agree that the 2.12.0 release of R is quite far in the future.  Is
    BW> there a possibility of relaxing the exclusion criteria
    BW> for CRAN?

Well, the criteria are very  good as a general rule,
but in the case where a new/changed package reveals a *bug* in
R-devel (only), the package of course should still be released
to CRAN.
So the only remaining problem for you ;-)
is to convince the CRAN maintainers that indeed this is a bug in
R-devel, or probably in  zlib 1.2.4 (R 2.11.x uses zlib 1.2.3).

Within R-core, Brian Ripley has been the zlib "principal
investigator", and I'd wait a bit for his comment on this issue.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich and R-Core Team

    BW> cheers...
    BW> Brandon

      PD> Please notice that there is NO release of R 2.12.0 until some time
      PD> around October. You are using a build from the UNSTABLE development
      PD> branch. The stable branch is 2.11.1 with a release date of May 31. If
      PD> Ubuntu is claiming that there is such a thing as a R 2.12.0 release, I'd
      PD> say that they  have a problem.

      PD> Not that we don't welcome reports on problems in the development branch,
      PD> but do notice that it is by definition UNSTABLE, and that bugs can come
      PD> and go without notice.

      PD> -pd