User manual

Chapter 16: Bugs and Bug Reporting, Mailing Lists 80
16 Bugs and Bug Reporting, Mailing Lists
16.1 Bugs
• Commands like ess-display-help-on-object and list completion cannot be used
while the user is entering a multi-line command. The only real fix in this situation is
to use another ESS process.
• The ess-eval- commands can leave point in the ESS process buffer in the wrong place
when point is at the same position as the last process output. This proves difficult to
fix, in general, as we need to consider all windows with window-point at the right
place.
• It’s possible to clear the modification flag (say, by saving the buffer) with the edit buffer
not having been loaded into S.
• Backup files can sometimes be left behind, even when ess-keep-dump-files is nil.
• Passing an incomplete S expression to ess-execute causes ESS to hang.
• The function-based commands don’t always work as expected on functions whose body
is not a parenthesized or compound expression, and don’t even recognize anonymous
functions (i.e. functions not assigned to any variable).
• Multi-line commands could be handled better by the command history mechanism.
• Changes to the continutation prompt in R (e.g. options(continue = " ")) are not
automatically detected by ESS. Hence, for now, the best thing is not to change the
continuation prompt. If you do change the continuation prompt, you will need to change
accordingly the value of inferior-ess-secondary-prompt in R-customize-alist.
16.2 Reporting Bugs
Please send bug reports, suggestions etc. to [e-mail]
The easiest way to do this is within Emacs by typing
M-x ess-submit-bug-report
This also gives the maintainers valuable information about your installation which may
help us to identify or even fix the bug.
If Emacs reports an error, backtraces can help us debug the problem. Type "M-x set-
variable RET debug-on-error RET t RET". Then run the command that causes the error
and you should see a *Backtrace* buffer containing debug information; send us that buffer.
Note that comments, suggestions, words of praise and large cash donations are also more
than welcome.
16.3 Mailing Lists
There is a mailing list for discussions and announcements relating to ESS. Join
the list by sending an e-mail with "subscribe ess-help" (or "help") in the body to
[e-mail]; contributions to the list may be mailed to
[e-mail]. Rest assured, this is a fairly low-volume mailing list.
The purposes of the mailing list include