[Rsiena-help] Update failed

[Tom Snijders]

Dear George,

As you may have seen, your update to RSiena at R-Forge failed. The windows-devel toolchain ended with the error:

  > library(parallel)
  > cl <- makeForkCluster(2)
  Error in makeForkCluster(2) : fork clusters are not supported on Windows
  Execution halted

What are the platforms for which this makeForkCluster command works? If Windows is not included but, e.g., Linux is, then the solution is to drop this test from tests/parallel.R, make sure by your own test that it works on other platforms, and leave the rest as it is.

Further, can you please send a longer description to me of how this works, understandable for R users whose knowledgeof computer science is limited? Then I can see how I incorporate this somewhere in the manual. You can do this in an email directly to me; for the current message, I thought it is better to report this also to rsiena-help.

Best wishes,
Tom



================================================================
Tom A.B. Snijders
Professor of Statistics and Methodology
Dept. of Sociology, University of Groningen
Emeritus Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Associate Member, Dept. of Statistics, University of Oxford
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~snijders/

From: rsiena-help-bounces at lists.r-forge.r-project.org [mailto:rsiena-help-bounces at lists.r-forge.r-project.org] On Behalf Of Tom Snijders
Sent: 05 October 2016 13:43
To: rsiena-help at lists.r-forge.r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rsiena-help] More flexibility on using Clusters

Dear George,

That’s wonderful. This will be great for some users! I look forward to see these changes.

I suppose that you are indeed talking about RSiena and not RSienaTest.

For committing the new version to R-Forge, there is a file "\RSienaTest\doc\HowToCommit.pdf" (with the corresponding .tex) that gives the brief rules to follow; there is a larger file in the same directory called SienaDeveloper. This tells about the versions to use. Currently indeed the next version will be 1.1-301; if you happen to wait until I’ll have committed my next changes (could be next week), this will have changed to 1.1-302. To be safe, I always first do Tortoise-update before Tortoise-commit.

There are no currently active plans to replace siena07 by sienacpp. Some options are different between the two. Evidently it is unpleasant to maintain two different functions that do almost the same. I copy in Felix Schoenenberger who wrote sienacpp and still is working on elaborating the GMM estimator.

Changing the printing of warnings and messages to using R functions would be great indeed.

Best regards,
Tom


================================================================
Tom A.B. Snijders
Professor of Statistics and Methodology
Dept. of Sociology, University of Groningen
Emeritus Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Associate Member, Dept. of Statistics, University of Oxford
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~snijders/

From: George Vega Yon [mailto:g.vegayon at gmail.com]
Sent: 04 October 2016 23:58
To: Tom Snijders
Cc: Christian Steglich (c.e.g.steglich at rug.nl) (c.e.g.steglich at rug.nl)
Subject: Re: [Rsiena-help] More flexibility on using Clusters

Dear Prof. Snijders,

I've just finished adding the new feature in -siena07- allowing to pass a cluster object (cl) directly. I've included a simple example in tests/parallel.R and added the new argument in the documentation of siena07.r without changing the sienacpp function. Before pushing my changes, I wanted to ask you something: In the ChangeLog file, what revision number should I include (currently 300)? Should I change the version number as well? If so, what versioning system do you use?

About the sienacpp parallelization method, are you planning to replace siena07 with sienacpp? I get that using OpenMP for parallelization might better but, as user, I think it is nice to have the option of using parallel::makeCluster since it can be useful for some (as myself). Ideally one could have both options: Split the work into C computers and latter use OpenMP within each computer to speed up things even more.

Finally, looking around I realized that you have a lot of lines creating warnings and printing messages on the screen. While those do the work it might be useful to use R's warning() and message() built in functions instead since the former allows R keeping track of warnings internally and both allow using the functions suppressWarnings() and suppressMessages(). Perhaps I might be able to change those some time if you are OK with that (not a big change but makes it nicer with R... warnings show with different color in RStudio for example).

Best,

George G. Vega Yon
+1 (626) 381 8171
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gvegayon/
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