13. Bugs and Bug Reporting, Mailing Lists

13.1 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.

13.2 Reporting Bugs

<A HREF="mailto:ESS-bugs@stat.math.ethz.ch"> ESS-bugs@stat.math.ethz.ch </A>

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.

13.3 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 ess-help-request@stat.math.ethz.ch; contributions to the list may be mailed to ess-help@stat.math.ethz.ch. Rest assured, this is a fairly low-volume mailing list.

The purposes of the mailing list include

• helping users of ESS to get along with it.
• discussing aspects of using ESS on Emacs and XEmacs.
• suggestions for improvements.
• announcements of new releases of ESS.
• posting small patches to ESS.