[R-SIG-Mac] [R] lme4 + R 2.11.0 + mac unavailable

[Martin Maechler]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 17:29, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:
>
> On Jul 29, 2010, at 7:51 PM, Martin Maechler wrote:
>
>>>>>>> "KB" == Ken Beath <ken at kjbeath.com.au>
>>>>>>>    on Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:19:34 -0000 (GMT) writes:
>>
>>    KB> On Tue, July 27, 2010 11:07 pm, John Maindonald wrote:
>>>> Binaries for lme4 are not for the time being available either on
>>>> CRAN or on r-forge?
>>>>
>>
>>    KB> There was a discussion about this on R-Sig-ME. It fails one of the checks
>>    KB> on the machine used to build the mac packages. It may pass on machines
>>    KB> with a later version of MacOS, but there didn't seem to be a consensus of
>>    KB> whether failing the checks was a problem.
>>
>> The underlyign issue seems to remain unresolved.
>> My best guess is still to low-level bugs somewhere in the libraries
>> used.
>>
>> However, to help users,
>> I'm willing to *not* run those tests when *running* on the Mac.
>>
>> What does
>>     Sys.info()[["sysname"]]
>>
>> return on the Mac, i.e., different versions of R running on the
>> Mac?
>> From grepping around I'd expect it give  "Darwin"  in all cases.
>> Is that true?
>>
>
> ... why don't you just compare the values with tolerance? That seems to make more sense that to disable the test altogether ...
>

Doug and I have explained in several occasions (but maybe not on R-SIG-Mac)
that this is *NOT* the point here.
It's not about "basically the same computations" it's about
identical computations, i.e. from identical numerical matrices and so
the use of identical() has been very much on purpose, and is different
from the well justified typical use of
all.equal() which we use in many other places.

And what people where reporting *is* a bit disturbing: The same
computations giving different answers for *exactly* the same
computation, e.g., depending if they had used
library(lme4)  or  require(lme4)  to load the package ...
and the difference was not just the last significant bit, but changes
at about the 7-th significant digit.

Martin


> Cheers,
> Simon
>