I would like to be able to easily check if it is only me who is experiencing problems building certain packages on certain architectures, or if it the issue applies to everybody. Being able to see the current build bots stats would be very helpful in this. Is this information publicly available somewhere?
The naclports waterfall is publicly accessible at (albeit running very slowly...):
http://build.chromium.org/p/client.nacl.ports/
You have to use Ubuntu Precise x86_64, which runs on the bots.
Related
I need to scrape content and sniff network activity from an asynchronous web page using R.
The problem is that in my team we work both on Mac and Windows machines on a project directory shared via github.
This creates quite some problem in using external headless browsers via RSelenium (mac/windows path differences, different locations of executables, dynamic number of collaborators).
So an ideal solution would be to use some simple headless browser written directly in R and installed as a package, so that we don't have to take care of OS support, location, etc...
Does such a package exist?
Looks like there are now solutions to do this through packages like https://github.com/rstudio/chromote or https://github.com/RLesur/crrri without installing any headless browser since recently Chrome exposes an API for interacting with it.
I am working as a Data Scientist for a small start up and we are using R as part of our platform for analysis, dashboards etc. Therefore, I need to ensure that we maintain security with each package we use and load.
I have looked around and done extensive searching and have come across the following links:
This is the official R Studio Blog Security update page.
This blog post shows how you can implement rJava to help with those packages that require it, though it does state that '...the integrity & safety of the R package ecosystem is still in the “trust me, everything’s 👍!!”'
This post gives some good advice for package security, but basically boils down to: if you get it from CRAN or another trusted source then it should be ok.
The CVE site lists vulnerabilities, though the last one was back in 2017.
However, all the above links essentially say the same thing, which is "if its from CRAN (or similar), then it is probably fine". Now this might indeed be the case, but I was hoping for something a bit more rigorous. Has anyone else come across this issue with production R deployment?
If possible, if someone could direct to where I might be able to find out more information on checking for security updates, breaches and changes for R packages, or how to go about testing the security myself, I would be very grateful.
Thanks!
I have an existing software system in pure Java (1.8, currently 32 bit), using Eclipse's EMF Client Platform. Some modules are opened in normal web browsers like IE, Chrome etc. while others are loaded into an Eclipse client as Eclipse plugins. We're using Eclipse Mars.
We're looking to automate our testing with HP's UFT, so we're trying it out for the first time with a freshly downloaded trial version. We easily figured out how to use UFT with modules that are opened in a web browser from a tutorial I found online.
However, we're unable to say the same for the part of the system opened in the Eclipse client. My PM did a little preliminary research and some say there are compatibility issues. Right now I'm investigating this in-depth with the objective to get it working if possible. I Google'd with the terms UFT, Eclipse plugin, and/or EMF Client Platform without useful result.
As someone using this tool for the first time, I'm looking for help from those with experience in the community. Do you know any tutorial, documentation, any material that can assist me, whether to solve the problem outright or at least to help me understand the relevant parts of the UFT tool?
I understand LeanFT is installed with UFT, so I am open to using it as an alternative. Thanks!
Is there a standard R community resource for keeping up to date on known bugs or bug fixes for packages? My current approach is rather manual. (NB: I'm restricting this to CRAN - see Note 1.)
My use case is basically bug surveillance and the management of package updates. I've been averaging a couple of bug discoveries each month for awhile (which I duly report to the authors ;-)). Since a lot of my work is done with virtual machines, I tend to update the VM images when I have a good handle on the bug status for necessary packages. When a bunch of bugs are fixed, I can remove my workarounds, which is great, and I update the images. When I discover an outbreak of bugs, I don't create a new image.
Here are the sources I'm currently using:
NEWS files: Many, but not all, packages have NEWS files. These are certainly a helpful place to start.
Package home page: Some packages do not have a NEWS file on CRAN, but separately post a change log on the author's site.
R project-hosted mailing lists
Google Groups for packages
Personal communication with package authors
Bug tracking for packages (e.g. a developer may use Bugzilla)
It's one thing to be the first to discover a bug (I grant that bugs happen to all of us), it's another to belatedly discover a bug that is either already known or, better yet, already fixed. Both slow down my own coding, but better bug surveillance (maybe we need a cdc4R package :)) would significantly reduce the impact. Without a standard update alerting system (e.g. an extension to update.packages() that reports on which packages could be updated and links to info on what's changed), it's the user's job to seek out this information.
As such a user, trying to seek out this information, is there some standard resource I've overlooked in the list above? For instance, is there an R mailing list where it's common for developers to post their changes and bug fixes? Or is there a site that aggregates such posts, posts tests (CRAN posts R CMD CHECK output, it seems), or that gives some other feedback?
A few additional notes on other resources, for others' benefit:
I see that CRANberries has a terse diff summary on packages, which is new to me. (I am inspired to consider a grep for bug or fix in the diff output.)
bug.report() in R is a good way to send a message to R Core or the email address of a package maintainer.
Several testing packages worth consideration are: testthat, RUnit, and svUnit.
My personal "quick test" is to simply use digest to verify that results match, without having to test equality of very large objects.
Note 1: I'm tagging this cran because it's impossible to manage the universe of all R packages. For an individual package author, one can distribute a package wherever they'd like, use whatever mailing list or bug tracking system they like, etc. However, that's outside the "mainstream" for R. Were I to release a package and alert users to changes, bugs, bugfixes, I'd go with CRAN + NEWS + Bugzilla + Google Groups + R-Forge (and/or RForge), etc., but is there another standard reporting mechanism that is missing from this list?
In some sense, this note also serves to ask if there's a mechanism that developers are encouraged to use. I suspect there is no standard, as packages by R Core members seem to do many different things regarding bug and change reporting.
Note 2: I'm also adding administration (though something else may be more apropos), since this also relates to administering R. For reproducibility, administration of packages is quite important; when there are multiple users or more moving pieces, keeping aware of bugs and fixes becomes an administrative task, as well as an important consideration for development that depends on the external packages. If another tag, e.g. system-administration is more appropriate, I'm open to a change.
Not a complete answer but here are some thoughts.
In the case of data.table we track bugs (and feature requests) on R-Forge here. I imagine you could query R-Forge's tracker (programatically) for all packages hosted there. To add to your list anyway. That web tracker is where bug.report(package="data.table") points to (not just an email address to maintainer).
Also, anyone can subscribe to any <pkgname>-commits#lists.r-forge.r-project.org mailing list to receive a unified diff and commit message (at the time of commit) for each project on R-Forge. I'm not aware of a general mailing list spanning any commit to any R-Forge project, though.
At the top of ?data.table there is a link to up to the minute NEWS. This is how we communicate to users what is in the latest version (and in development) if they upgrade. That link updates in real-time; i.e., "up to the minute" is meant literally. But, they do have to check there!
I am having an application that will be installed on various machines. Now if i have a newer version than the installed one, i need to inform the users that an update is available. An update that shows up in Mozilla Firefox about a newer version,similar to that. Is this possible to implement?? Or how those Firefox guys implementing that feature? My application has been implemented using Qt 4.4. But i guess this doesn't conform to a specific programming language. I have virtually no idea about implementing this so any ideas regarding this are welcome.
you need a web site page, like http://yourapp.com/version
and place version number in this page.
each time your app runs, check this page(quietly),
if found version > current version, then open a confirm window.