geom_contour() documentation states false precedence of bin and binwidth parameters

[eliocamp]

Right now the documentation for geom_contour() and friends states that the bin argument is overridden by the binwidth parameter. However, this seems not to be the case.

library(ggplot2)


v <- ggplot(faithfuld, aes(waiting, eruptions, z = density)) 

# Defining bins
v + geom_contour(bins = 5)

# Defining binwidth
v + geom_contour(binwidth = 0.001)

# Defining both. Per documentation, binwidth should 
# take precedence and this should be the same as the second plot
v + geom_contour(binwidth = 0.001, bins = 5)

^{Created on 2021-10-28 by the reprex package (v2.0.0)}

The issue lays on the contour_breaks() function, which computes the binwidth from the bins if bins is not NULL:

ggplot2/R/stat-contour.r

Lines 158 to 170 in 759c63c

	if (!is.null(bins)) {
	# round lower limit down and upper limit up to make sure
	# we generate bins that span the data range nicely
	accuracy <- signif(diff(z_range), 1)/10
	z_range[1] <- floor(z_range[1]/accuracy)*accuracy
	z_range[2] <- ceiling(z_range[2]/accuracy)*accuracy
	if (bins == 1) {
	return(z_range)
	}
	binwidth <- diff(z_range) / (bins - 1)
	breaks <- fullseq(z_range, binwidth)

I believe that previous versions of geom_contour() did respect the documentation. Should the documentation be changed to reflect the new precedence or should the code be changed to reflect the documentation?

[thomasp85]

@clauswilke is this a leftover bug from the contour rewrite?

[clauswilke]

Possibly, though it's also possible it was never right. There's no technical reason I can see why the contour rewrite would have touched this part.

In any case, I have no strong opinion about the order of precedence, but I agree we should fix this. I'd vote for fixing the documentation. Let's not touch the code unless there's a good reason to do so.