[Rd] Bug reporting system inquiry plus a bug report related to sort

[Marc Schwartz]

On Mar 4, 2010, at 9:29 AM, Tom Short wrote:

> Is the bug-reporting system working okay? Two days ago, I submitted
> the following bug report via email to r-bugs at r-project.org. I didn't
> see a confirmation, and it didn't see it at
> http://bugs.r-project.org/. Now, http://bugs.r-project.org/ seems to
> be down.
> 
> Anyway, here's the bug report related to sort.list and sort(...,
> index.return = TRUE) with na.last = NA
> 
> 
> I think that both sort.list(x, na.last = NA) and sort(x, na.last = NA,
> index.return = TRUE)$ix give incorrect answers with na.last. With
> na.last, both of these return answers equivalent to
> sort.list(na.omit(x)), and I think they should be the equivalent of
> order(x, na.last=NA) as follows.
> 
>> x <- c(1L, 6L, NA, 2L)
>> order(x, na.last = NA) # right
> [1] 1 4 2
>> sort.list(x, na.last = NA, method = "radix") # wrong, I think
> [1] 1 3 2
>> sort.list(x, na.last = NA, method = "quick") # wrong
> [1] 1 3 2
>> sort(x, na.last = NA, index.return = TRUE)$ix # wrong
> [1] 1 3 2
> 
> I've included a patch for the "radix" and "shell" methods of
> sort.list. The sort and "quick" method of sort.list (which uses sort)
> look more challenging. With the patch, I get:
> 
>> sort.list(x, na.last = NA, method = "radix") # good
> [1] 1 4 2
>> sort.list(x, na.last = NA, method = "shell") # good
> [1] 1 4 2
>> sort.list(x, na.last = NA, method = "quick") # still bad
> [1] 1 3 2
> 
> By the way, having the radix sort is great. It's really fast for factors.
> 
> - Tom
> 
> Tom Short
> Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)
> 
> 
> 
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
> i386-pc-mingw32
> 
> locale:
> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
> [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C
> [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base


Tom, 

See this recent follow up posting from Peter:

  http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e9/devel/10/02/0375.html

There has been talk over the years of moving to Bugzilla, but I am not clear on present status.

Perhaps the link on the main R Project page needs to be removed or better, updated to a link with a status update on the R bug reporting process. Of course, that does not help folks using bug.report(), which presumably needs to be updated as well.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz