Dear R Devel, I know that someone put this line in src/modules/X11/devX11.c:2824 for a reason, because commenting it out causes R to miss an important ConfigureNotify event in my window manager. The result is that plots are initially drawn off the window borders, unreadable.
R_ProcessX11Events((void*) NULL); Unfortunately for me, this line is commented in the standard release of R, it has "#if BUG ... #endif" around it. I guess it is also unfortunate for anyone who uses the same window manager as I do, namely i3, which I think is pretty popular among Unix power users these days; not to mention other full-screen window managers which probably exhibit the same bug in R. Maybe everyone on the Core team uses twm as their window manager? Or RStudio on Windows? Which would be sad because then we're not representing an important user demographic, namely those who prefer software which is modern and powerful, yet simple to understand and modify; fully configurable and interoperable and so on. I first reported this bug 3 years ago. In doing research for my bug report, I found that the line was commented out by Peter Dalgaard in 2001 with the explanation "X11 segfault fix - I hope". I don't know what the way forward is. Obviously the Core Team has reason to say, "look, this isn't very important, it's been broken since 2001, maybe fixing it will cause the undocumented segfault bug to reappear, clearly no one here uses your window manager". Do I have to submit a correctness proof for the proposed change? What do I do? https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16702 As mentioned in my bug report, I checked using gdb that ConfigureNotify is indeed being received by the call to R_ProcessX11Events() when it is uncommented. I haven't experienced any segfaults. It's good that Peter left evidence that "R_ProcessX11Events" was being called 18 years ago from X11DeviceDriver(). If he had deleted the line, rather than commenting it, then discovering the reason for the window rendering bug would have been much harder for me. However, the downside is that now it is not just a matter of inserting the line where it belongs; I also feel a bit like I have to explain why it was initially removed. But although I've given it some thought, I still have no idea. Somewhat tangentially, I am wondering if there is some way that we could make the development of R's graphics code proceed at a faster rate, for example by pulling it out into a separate module, so that people could offer alternative implementations via CRAN etc., rather than having R Core be the bottleneck. Would this make sense? Has it already been done? Thank you, Frederick ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel