reporting R crashes as bugs

Question

Recently I am crashing R relatively often. The message is invariably

*** caught segfault ***
address xxx, cause 'memory not mapped'

Reproducing would be hard, and in any case I could not share the large proprietary data sets. My question is: can I report the crash so that it is investigated? Would generating the coredump help? It seems that the FAQ section on reporting bugs is not meant for this contingency.

Answer 1

I wouldn't report them to R-core / R-devel unless you're 100% certain it's a bug in R and not a package. It's more likely the bug is in a package you're using. If you can't create a reproducible example of the bug, the package maintainer isn't likely to try to hunt it down.

Answer 2

This error message can occur with

1. Hardware overheating
2. Using outdated versions of R or of packages
3. A bug in a package
4. A bug in R

Until you can reproduce it, with fake data if you don't want to expose your own, that I doubt anyone will pay attention to a crash report.