[R-sig-finance] (i) bug report in listFinCenter and (ii) question

[Parlamis Franklin]

Thanks, Dirk.  I tried to send the bug report to Diethelm, but his  
email address bounced, and he does not list an alternate on the  
Rmetrics web site (only his phone number).

On Oct 4, 2005, at 3:01 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> On 4 October 2005 at 14:46, Parlamis Franklin wrote:
> |      Hello all.
> |
> |      I am using the Mac OS X version of R (Aqua GUI 1.12, R  
> Framework
> | 2.1.1).
> |
> |     (i) The function 'listFinCenter' in the fCalendar package does
> | not work.  Having checked the code of that function it appears the
> | problem is in the passing of the '*' regular expression pattern to
> | the R grep function.  R complains that this is not a valid regular
> | expression.  I am not sure whether this bug is the result of more
> | liberal regular expression matching on the Windows platform (on  
> which
> | fCalendar has been exclusively tested) than on UNIX, or whether it
> | results from the fact that R, as of version 2.1.0, has switched its
> | standard for regular expression matching to glibc 2.3.3 from grep  
> 2.4.2.
> |
> |      In any event, I have found that replacing the pattern '*' with
> | the pattern '.*' will do the trick (although I must admit the entire
> | grep call seems a bit superfluous to me--perhaps the function was
> | originally intended to do more than it currently does).
>
> I think Diethelm listens in here, so he may pick this up. If all  
> else fails
> you can always send bug reports to the package author/maintainer :)
>
> |     (ii) As we all know by now, fCalendar needs the TZ environment
> | variable to be set to 'GMT'.  However, as installed on my Mac, a
> | Sys.getenv() call returned no environment variable named TZ.  My
> | solution was to use Sys.putenv() in my .Rprofile file to initialize
> | and set the TZ variable to 'GMT'.  This stopped the program from
> | complaining, but I am a bit concerned that the solution will not  
> be a
> | complete one.  My system clock is still set to my local time zone  
> and
> | daylight savings rules, so that other programs in other environments
> | on my system know the time to be different than R.  Does anyone
> | foresee a problem with this workaround?  Is there a better way?
>
> I think that is a fair solution as .Rprofile should only affect R, and
> processes spawned by R, if any.  So it should _not_ spill over to  
> other
> apps.
>
> We have the same issue on Debian where timezone behaviour is  
> controlled by
> the file /etc/timezone, and TZ is unset by default. I also wish the  
> code in
> fCalendar (and similarly in its and other packages using timezone  
> info) was
> smarter amd set a default as fallback.
>
> Best regards, Dirk
>
> -- 
> Statistics: The (futile) attempt to offer certainty about uncertainty.
>          -- Roger Koenker, 'Dictionary of Received Ideas of  
> Statistics'
>