NEW FEATURES:
* When attach() reports conflicts, it does so compatibly with
library() by using message().
* R CMD Sweave no longer cleans any files by default, compatibly
with versions of R prior to 3.1.0. There are new options
--clean, --clean=default and --clean=keepOuts.
* tools::buildVignette() and tools::buildVignettes() with clean =
FALSE no longer remove any created files. buildvignette() gains
a keep argument for more cleaning customization.
* The Bioconductor 'version' used by setRepositories() can now be
set by environment variable R_BIOC_VERSION at runtime, not just
when R is installed. (It has been stated that Bioconductor will
switch from 'version' 2.14 to 'version' 3.0 during the lifetime
of the R 3.1 series.)
* Error messages from bugs in embedded Sexpr code in Sweave
documents now report the source location.
* type.convert(), read.table() and similar read.*() functions get a
new numerals argument, specifying how numeric input is converted
when its conversion to double precision loses accuracy. The
default value, "allow.loss" allows accuracy loss, as in R
versions before 3.1.0.
* For some compilers, integer addition could overflow without a
warning. R's internal code for both integer addition and
subtraction is more robust now.
* The function determining the default number of knots for
smooth.spline() is now exported, as .nknots.smspl().
* dbeta(, a,b), pbeta(), qbeta() and rbeta() are now defined also
for a = 0, b = 0, or infinite a and b (where they typically
returned NaN before).
* Many package authors report that the RStudio graphics device does
not work correctly with their package's use of dev.new(). The
new option dev.new(noRStudioGD = TRUE) replaces the RStudio
override by the default device as selected by R itself, still
respecting environment variables R_INTERACTIVE_DEVICE and
R_DEFAULT_DEVICE.
* readRDS() now returns visibly.
* Modifying internal logical scalar constants now results in an
error instead of a warning.
* install.packages(repos = NULL) now accepts http:// or ftp:// URLs
of package archives as well as file paths, and will download as
required. In most cases repos = NULL can be deduced from the
extension of the URL.
* The warning when using partial matching with the $ operator on
data frames is now only given when
options("warnPartialMatchDollar") is TRUE.
* Package help requests like package?foo now try the package foo
whether loaded or not.
* General help requests now default to trying all loaded packages,
not just those on the search path.
* Added a new function promptImport(), to generate a help page for
a function that was imported from another package (and presumably
re-exported, or help would not be needed).
Do it for all packages that
* mention perl, or
* have a directory name starting with p5-*, or
* depend on a package starting with p5-
like last time, for 5.18, where this didn't lead to complaints.
Let me know if you have any this time.
NEW FEATURES:
* type.convert() (and hence by default read.table()) returns a
character vector or factor when representing a numeric input as a
double would lose accuracy. Similarly for complex inputs.
If a file contains numeric data with unrepresentable numbers of
decimal places that are intended to be read as numeric, specify
colClasses in read.table() to be "numeric".
* tools::Rdiff(useDiff = FALSE) is closer to the POSIX definition
of diff -b (as distinct from the description in the man pages of
most systems).
* New function anyNA(), a version of any(is.na(.)) which is fast
for atomic vectors, based on a proposal by Tim Hesterberg.
* arrayInd(*, useNames = TRUE) and, analogously, which(*, arr.ind =
TRUE) now make use of names(.dimnames) when available.
* is.unsorted() now also works for raw vectors.
* The "table" method for as.data.frame() (also useful as
as.data.frame.table()) now passes sep and base arguments to
provideDimnames().
* uniroot() gets new optional arguments, notably extendInt,
allowing to auto-extend the search interval when needed. The
return value has an extra component, init.it.
* switch(f, ...) now warns when f is a factor, as this typically
happens accidentally where the useR meant to pass a character
string, but f is treated as integer (as always documented).
* The parser has been modified to use less memory.
* The way the unary operators (+ - !) handle attributes is now more
consistent. If there is no coercion, all attributes (including
class) are copied from the input to the result: otherwise only
names, dims and dimnames are.
* colorRamp() and colorRampPalette() now allow non-opaque colours
and a ramp in opacity via the new argument alpha = TRUE.
(Suggested by Alberto Krone-Martins, but optionally as there are
existing uses which expect only RGB values.)
* grid.show.layout() and grid.show.viewport() get an optional vp.ex
argument.
* There is a new function find_gs_cmd() in the tools package to
locate a GhostScript executable. (This is an enhanced version of
a previously internal function there.)
* object.size() gains a format() method.
* There is a new family, "ArialMT", for the pdf() and postscript()
devices. This will only be rendered correctly on viewers which
have access to Monotype TrueType fonts (which are sometimes
requested by journals).
* The text and PDF news files, including NEWS and NEWS.2, have been
moved to the doc directory.
* combn(x, simplify = TRUE) now gives a factor result for factor
input x (previously user error).
* Added utils::fileSnapshot() and utils::changedFiles() functions
to allow snapshots and comparison of directories of files.
* make.names(names, unique=TRUE) now tries to preserve existing
names.
* New functions cospi(x), sinpi(x), and tanpi(x), for more accurate
computation of cos(pi*x), etc, both in R and the C API. Using
these gains accuracy in some cases, e.g., inside lgamma() or
besselI().
* print.table(x, zero.print = ".") now also has an effect when x is
not integer-valued.
* There is more support to explore the system's idea of time-zone
names. Sys.timezone() tries to give the current system setting
by name (and succeeds at least on Linux, OS X, Solaris and
Windows), and OlsonNames() lists the names in the system's Olson
database. Sys.timezone(location = FALSE) gives the previous
behaviour.
* Platforms with a 64-bit time_t type are allowed to handle
conversions between the "POSIXct" and "POSIXlt" classes for
date-times outside the 32-bit range (before 1902 or after 2037):
the existing workarounds are used on other platforms. (Note that
time-zone information for post-2037 is speculative at best, and
the OS services are tested for known errors and so not used on OS
X.)
Currently time_t is usually long and hence 64-bit on Unix-alike
64-bit platforms: however it several cases the time-zone database
is 32-bit. On R for Windows it is 64-bit (for both architectures
as from this version).
* The "save.defaults" option can include a value for
compression_level.
* colSums() and friends now have support for arrays and data-frame
columns with 2^31 or more elements.
* as.factor() is faster when f is an unclassed integer vector (for
example, when called from tapply()).
* fft() now works with longer inputs, from the 12 million
previously supported up to 2 billion.
* Complex svd() now uses LAPACK subroutine ZGESDD, the complex
analogue of the routine used for the real case.
* Sweave now outputs .tex files in UTF-8 if the input encoding is
declared to be UTF-8, regardless of the local encoding. The
UTF-8 encoding may now be declared using a LaTeX comment
containing the string %\SweaveUTF8 on a line by itself.
* file.copy() gains a copy.date argument.
* Printing of date-times will make use of the time-zone
abbreviation in use at the time, if known. For example, for
Paris pre-1940 this could be LMT, PMT, WET or WEST. To enable
this, the "POSIXlt" class has an optional component "zone"
recording the abbreviation for each element.
For platforms which support it, there is also a component
"gmtoff" recording the offset from GMT where known.
* (On Windows, by default on OS X and optionally elsewhere.) The
system C function strftime has been replaced by a more
comprehensive version with closer conformance to the POSIX 2008
standard.
* dnorm(x, log = FALSE) is more accurate (but somewhat slower) for
|x| > 5.
* Some versions of the tiff() device have further compression
options.
* read.table(), readLines() and scan() have a new argument to
influence the treatment of embedded nuls.
* Avoid duplicating the right hand side values in complex
assignments when possible. This reduces copying of replacement
values in expressions such as Z$a <- a0 and ans[[i]] <- tmp: some
package code has relied on there being copies.
Also, a number of other changes to reduce copying of objects; all
contributed by or based on suggestions by Michael Lawrence.
* The fast argument of KalmanLike(), KalmanRun() and
KalmanForecast() has been replaced by update, which instead of
updating mod in place, optionally returns the updated model in an
attribute "mod" of the return value.
* arima() and makeARIMA() get a new optional argument SSinit,
allowing the choice of a different *s*tate *s*pace initialization
which has been observed to be more reliable close to
non-stationarity.
* warning() has a new argument noBreaks., to simplify
post-processing of output with options(warn = 1).
* pushBack() gains an argument encoding, to support reading of
UTF-8 characters using scan(), read.table() and related functions
in a non-UTF-8 locale.
* all.equal.list() gets a new argument use.names which by default
labels differing components by names (if they match) rather than
by integer index. Saved R output in packages may need to be
updated.
* The methods for all.equal() and attr.all.equal() now have
argument check.attributes after ... so it cannot be partially nor
positionally matched (as it has been, unintentionally).
A side effect is that some previously undetected errors of
passing empty arguments (no object between commas) to all.equal()
are detected and reported.
There are explicit checks that check.attributes is logical,
tolerance is numeric and scale is NULL or numeric. This catches
some unintended positional matching.
The message for all.equal.numeric() reports a "scaled difference"
only for scale != 1.
* all.equal() now has a "POSIXt" method replacing the "POSIXct"
method.
* The "Date" and "POSIXt" methods of seq() allows by = "quarter"
for completeness (by = "3 months" always worked).
* file.path() removes any trailing separator on Windows, where they
are invalid (although sometimes accepted). This is intended to
enhance the portability of code written by those using POSIX file
systems (where a trailing / can be used to confine path matching
to directories).
* New function agrepl() which like grepl() returns a logical
vector.
* fifo() is now supported on Windows.
* sort.list(method = "radix") now allows negative integers
* Some functionality of print.ts() is now available in
.preformat.ts() for more modularity.
* mcparallel() gains an option detach = TRUE which allows execution
of code independently of the current session. It is based on a
new estranged = TRUE argument to mcfork() which forks child
processes such that they become independent of the parent
process.
* The pdf() device omits circles and text at extremely small sizes,
since some viewers were failing on such files.
* The rightmost break for the "months", "quarters" and "years"
cases of hist.POSIXlt() has been increased by a day.
* The handling of DF[i,] <- a where i is of length 0 is improved.
* hclust() gains a new method "ward.D2" which implements Ward's
method correctly. The previous "ward" method is "ward.D" now,
with the old name still working. Thanks to research and
proposals by Pierre Legendre.
* The sunspot.month dataset has been amended and updated from the
official source, whereas the sunspots and sunspot.year datasets
will remain immutable. The documentation and source links have
been updated correspondingly.
* The summary() method for "lm" fits warns if the fit is
essentially perfect, as most of the summary may be computed
inaccurately (and with platform-dependent values).
Programmers who use summary() in order to extract just a
component which will be reliable (e.g. $cov.unscaled) should wrap
their calls in suppressWarnings().
CHANGES IN R 3.0.3:
NEW FEATURES:
* On Windows there is support for making .texi manuals using
texinfo 5.0 or later: the setting is in file
src/gnuwin32/MkRules.dist.
A packaging of the Perl script and modules for texinfo 5.2 has
been made available at <URL:
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/>.
* write.table() now handles matrices of 2^31 or more elements, for
those with large amounts of patience and disc space.
* There is a new function, La_version(), to report the version of
LAPACK in use.
* The HTML version of 'An Introduction to R' now has links to PNG
versions of the figures.
* There is some support to produce manuals in ebook formats. (See
doc/manual/Makefile. Suggested by Mauro Cavalcanti.)
* On a Unix-alike Sys.timezone() returns NA if the environment
variable TZ is unset, to distinguish it from an empty string
which on some OSes means the UTC time zone.
* The backtick may now be escaped in strings, to allow names
containing them to be constructed, e.g. `\``.
* read.table(), readLines() and scan() now warn when an embedded
nul is found in the input.
* KalmanForecast(fast = FALSE) is now the default, and the help
contains an example of how fast = TRUE can be used in this
version. (The usage will change in 3.1.0.)
* strptime() now checks the locale only when locale-specific
formats are used and caches the locale in use: this can halve the
time taken on OSes with slow system functions (e.g. OS X).
* strptime() and the format() methods for classes "POSIXct",
"POSIXlt" and "Date" recognize strings with marked encodings:
this allows, for example, UTF-8 French month names to be read on
(French) Windows.
* iconv(to = "utf8") is now accepted on all platforms (some
implementations did already, but GNU libiconv did not: however
converted strings were not marked as being in UTF-8). The
official name, "UTF-8" is still preferred.
* available.packages() is better protected against corrupt metadata
files.
* Finalizers are marked to be run at garbage collection, but run
only at a somewhat safer later time (when interrupts are
checked). This circumvents some problems with finalizers running
arbitrary code during garbage collection (the known instances
being running options() and (C-level) path.expand()
re-entrantly).
* The NEWS files have been re-organized.
This file contains news for R >= 3.0.0: news for the 0.x.y, 1.x.y
and 2.x.y releases is in files NEWS.0, NEWS.1 and NEWS.2. The
latter files are now installed when R is installed. An HTML
version of news from 2.10.0 to 2.15.3 is available as
doc/html/NEWS.2.html.
* sum() for integer arguments now uses an integer accumulator of at
least 64 bits and so will be more accurate in the very rare case
that a cumulative sum exceeds 2^53 (necessarily summing more than
4 million elements).
* The example() and tools::Rd2ex() functions now have parameters to
allow them to ignore \dontrun markup in examples. (Suggested by
Peter Solymos.)
* str(x) is considerably faster for very large lists, or factors
with 100,000 levels, the latter as in PR#15337.
* col2rgb() now converts factors to character strings not integer
codes (suggested by Bryan Hanson).
* tail(warnings()) now works, via the new `[` method.
* There is now support for the LaTeX style file zi4.sty which has
in some distributions replaced inconsolata.sty.
* unlist(x) now typically returns all non-list xs unchanged, not
just the "vector" ones. Consequently, format(lst) now also works
when the list lst has non-vector elements.
* The tools::getVignetteInfo() function has been added to give
information about installed vignettes.
* New assertCondition(), etc. utilities in tools, useful for
testing.
* Profiling now records non-inlined calls from byte-compiled code
to BUILTIN functions.
* Various functions in stats and elsewhere that use non-standard
evaluation are now more careful to follow the namespace scoping
rules. E.g. stats::lm() can now find stats::model.frame() even
if stats is not on the search path or if some package defines a
function of that name.
* If an invalid/corrupt .Random.seed object is encountered in the
workspace it is ignored with a warning rather than giving an
error. (This allows R itself to rely on a working RNG, e.g. to
choose a random port.)
* seq() and seq.int() give more explicit error messages if called
with invalid (e.g. NaN) inputs.
* When parse() finds a syntax error, it now makes partial parse
information available up to the location of the error. (Request
of Reijo Sund.)
* Methods invoked by NextMethod() had a different dynamic parent to
the generic. This was causing trouble where S3 methods invoked
via lazy evaluation could lose track of their generic.
(PR#15267)
* Code for the negative binomial distribution now treats the case
size == 0 as a one-point distribution at zero.
* abbreviate() handles without warning non-ASCII input strings
which require no abbreviation.
* read.dcf() no longer has a limit of 8191 bytes per line. (Wish of
PR#15250.)
* formatC(x) no longer copies the class of x to the result, to
avoid misuse creating invalid objects as in PR#15303. A warning
is given if a class is discarded.
* Dataset npk has been copied from MASS to allow more tests to be
run without recommended packages being installed.
* The initialization of the regression coefficients for
non-degenerate differenced models in arima() has been changed and
in some examples avoids a local maximum. (PR#15396)
* termplot() now has an argument transform.x to control the display
of individual terms in the plot. (PR#15329)
* format() now supports digits = 0, to display nsmall decimal
places.
* There is a new read-only par() parameter called "page", which
returns a logical value indicating whether the next plot.new()
call will start a new page.
* Processing Sweave and Rd documents to PDF now renders backticks
* utils::modifyList() gets a new argument keep.null allowing NULL
components in the replacement to be retained, instead of causing
corresponding components to be deleted.
* tools::pkgVignettes() gains argument check; if set to TRUE, it
will warn when it appears a vignette requests a non-existent
vignette engine.
libraries when previously preferring libraries from pkgsrc causes conflicts.
Fixes build on SmartOS where the platform /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 for legacy
applications conflicts with GCC libraries from pkgsrc.
are replaced with .include "../../devel/readline/buildlink3.mk", and
USE_GNU_READLINE are removed,
* .include "../../devel/readline/buildlink3.mk" without USE_GNU_READLINE
are replaced with .include "../../mk/readline.buildlink3.mk".
to address issues with NetBSD-6(and earlier)'s fontconfig not being
new enough for pango.
While doing that, also bump freetype2 dependency to current pkgsrc
version.
Suggested by tron in PR 47882
a) refer 'perl' in their Makefile, or
b) have a directory name of p5-*, or
c) have any dependency on any p5-* package
Like last time, where this caused no complaints.
Approved by wiz@
Upstream changes:
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.15.1:
NEW FEATURES:
o source() now uses withVisible() rather than
.Internal(eval.with.vis). This sometimes alters tracebacks
slightly.
o install.packages("pkg_version.tgz") on Mac OS X now has sanity
checks that this is actually a binary package (as people have
tried it with incorrectly named source packages).
o splineDesign() and spline.des() in package splines have a new
option sparse which can be used for efficient construction of a
sparse B-spline design matrix (_via_ Matrix).
o norm() now allows type = "2" (the 'spectral' or 2-norm) as well,
mainly for didactical completeness.
o pmin() and pmax()) now also work when one of the inputs is of
length zero and others are not, returning a zero-length vector,
analogously to, say, +.
o colorRamp() (and hence colorRampPalette()) now also works for the
boundary case of just one color when the ramp is flat.
o qqline() has new optional arguments distribution, probs and
qtype, following the example of lattice's panel.qqmathline().
o .C() gains some protection against the misuse of character vector
arguments. (An all too common error is to pass character(N),
which initializes the elements to "", and then attempt to edit
the strings in-place, sometimes forgetting to terminate them.)
o Calls to the new function globalVariables() in package utils
declare that functions and other objects in a package should be
treated as globally defined, so that CMD check will not note
them.
o print(packageDescription(*)) trims the Collate field by default.
o The included copy of zlib has been updated to version 1.2.7.
o A new option "show.error.locations" has been added. When set to
TRUE, error messages will contain the location of the most recent
call containing source reference information. (Other values are
supported as well; see ?options.)
o The NA warning messages from e.g. pchisq() now report the call to
the closure and not that of the .Internal.
o Added Polish translations by <c5><81>ukasz Daniel.
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS:
o In package parallel, makeForkCluster() and the multicore-based
functions use native byte-order for serialization (deferred from
2.15.0).
o lm.fit(), lm.wfit(), glm.fit() and lsfit() do less copying of
objects, mainly by using .Call() rather than .Fortran().
o .C() and .Fortran() do less copying: arguments which are raw,
logical, integer, real or complex vectors and are unnamed are not
copied before the call, and (named or not) are not copied after
the call. Lists are no longer copied (they are supposed to be
used read-only in the C code).
o tabulate() makes use of .C(DUP = FALSE) and hence does not copy
bin. (Suggested by Tim Hesterberg.) It also avoids making a
copy of a factor argument bin.
o Other functions (often or always) doing less copying include
cut(), dist(), the complex case of eigen(), hclust(), image(),
kmeans(), loess(), stl() and svd(LINPACK = TRUE).
o There is less copying when using primitive replacement functions
such as names(), attr() and attributes().
DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
o The converters for use with .C() (see ?getCConverterDescriptions)
are deprecated: use the .Call() interface instead. There are no
known examples (they were never fully documented).
UTILITIES:
o For R CMD check, a few people have reported problems with
junctions on Windows (although they were tested on Windows 7, XP
and Server 2008 machines and it is unknown under what
circumstances the problems occur). Setting the environment
variable R_WIN_NO_JUNCTIONS to a non-empty value (e.g. in
~/.R/check.Renviron) will force copies to be used instead.
INSTALLATION:
o R CMD INSTALL with _R_CHECK_INSTALL_DEPENDS_ set to a true value
(as done by R CMD check --as-cran) now restricts the packages
available when lazy-loading as well as when test-loading (since
packages such as ETLUtils and agsemisc had top-level calls to
library() for undeclared packages).
This check is now also available on Windows.
C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
o C entry points mkChar and mkCharCE now check that the length of
the string they are passed does not exceed 2^31-1 bytes: they
used to overflow with unpredictable consequences.
o C entry points R_GetCurrentSrcref and R_GetSrcFilename have been
added to the API to allow debuggers access to the source
references on the stack.
WINDOWS-SPECIFIC CHANGES:
o Windows-specific changes will now be announced in this file
(NEWS). Changes up and including R 2.15.0 remain in the CHANGES
file.
o There are two new environment variables which control the
defaults for command-line options.
If R_WIN_INTERNET2 is set to a non-empty value, it is as if
--internet2 was used.
If R_MAX_MEM_SIZE is set, it gives the default memory limit if
--max-mem-size is not specified: invalid values being ignored.
BUG FIXES:
o lsfit() lost the names from the residuals.
o More cases in which merge() could create a data frame with
duplicate column names now give warnings. Cases where names
specified in by match multiple columns are errors.
o Nonsense uses such as seq(1:50, by = 5) (from package plotrix)
and seq.int(1:50, by = 5) are now errors.
o The residuals in the 5-number summary printed by summary() on an
"lm" object are now explicitly labelled as weighted residuals
when non-constant weights are present. (Wish of PR#14840.)
o tracemem() reported that all objects were copied by .C() or
.Fortran() whereas only some object types were ever copied.
It also reported and marked as copies _some_ transformations such
as rexp(n, x): it no longer does so.
o The plot() method for class "stepfun" only used the optional xval
argument to compute xlim and not the points at which to plot (as
documented). (PR#14864)
o Names containing characters which need to be escaped were not
deparsed properly. (PR#14846)
o Trying to update (recommended) packages in R_HOME/library without
write access is now dealt with more gracefully. Further, such
package updates may be skipped (with a warning), when a newer
installed version is already going to be used from .libPaths().
(PR#14866)
o hclust() is now fast again (as up to end of 2003), with a
different fix for the "median"/"centroid" problem. (PR#4195).
o get_all_vars() failed when the data came entirely from vectors in
the global environment. (PR#14847)
o R CMD check with _R_CHECK_NO_RECOMMENDED_ set to a true value (as
done by the --as-cran option) could issue false errors if there
was an indirect dependency on a recommended package.
o formatC() uses the C entry point str_signif which could write
beyond the length allocated for the output string.
o Missing default argument added to implicit S4 generic for
backsolve(). (PR#14883)
o Some bugs have been fixed in handling load actions that could
fail to export assigned items or generate spurious warnings in
CMD check on loading.
o For tiff(type = "windows"), the numbering of per-page files
except the last was off by one.
o On Windows, loading package stats (which is done for a default
session) would switch line endings on stdout and stderr from CRLF
to LF. This affected Rterm and R CMD BATCH.
o On Windows, the compatibility function x11() had not kept up with
changes to windows(), and issued warnings about bad parameters.
(PR#14880)
o On Windows, the Sys.glob() function did not handle UNC paths as
it was designed to try to do. (PR#14884)
o In package parallel, clusterApply() and similar failed to handle
a (pretty pointless) length-1 argument. (PR#14898)
o Quartz Cocoa display reacted asynchronously to dev.flush() which
means that the redraw could be performed after the plot has been
already modified by subsequent code. The redraw is now done
synchronously in dev.flush() to allow animations without sleep
cycles.
o Source locations reported in traceback() were incorrect when
byte-compiled code was on the stack.
o plogis(x, lower = FALSE, log.p = TRUE) no longer underflows early
for large x (e.g. 800).
o ?Arithmetic's "1 ^ y and y ^ 0 are 1, _always_" now also applies
for integer vectors y.
o X11-based pixmap devices like png(type = "Xlib") were trying to
set the cursor style, which triggered some warnings and hangs.
o Code executed by the built-in HTTP server no longer allows other
HTTP clients to re-enter R until the current worker evaluation
finishes, to prevent cascades.
o The plot() and Axis() methods for class "table" now respect
graphical parameters such as cex.axis. (Reported by Martin
Becker.)
o Under some circumstances package.skeleton() would give out
progress reports that could not be translated and so were
displayed by question marks. Now they are always in English.
(This was seen for CJK locales on Windows, but may have occurred
elsewhere.)
o The evaluator now keeps track of source references outside of
functions, e.g. when source() executes a script.
o The replacement method for window() now works correctly for
multiple time series of class "mts". (PR#14925)
o is.unsorted() gave incorrect results on non-atomic objects such
as data frames. (Reported by Matthew Dowle.)
o The value returned by tools::psnice() for invalid pid values was
not always NA as documented.
o Closing an X11() window while locator() was active could abort
the R process.
o getMethod(f, sig) produced an incorrect error message in some
cases when f was not a string).
o Using a string as a "call" in an error condition with
options(showErrorCalls=TRUE) could cause a segfault. (PR#14931)
o The string "infinity" allowed by C99 was not accepted as a
numerical string value by e.g. scan() and as.character().
(PR#14933)
o In legend(), setting some entries of lwd to NA was inconsistent
(depending on the graphics device) in whether it would suppress
those lines; now it consistently does so. (PR#14926)
o by() failed for a zero-row data frame. (Reported by Weiqiang
Qian)
o Yates correction in chisq.test() could be bigger than the terms
it corrected, previously leading to an infinite test statistic in
some corner cases which are now reported as NaN.
o xgettext() and related functions sometimes returned items that
were not strings for translation. (PR#14935)
o plot(<lm>, which=5) now correctly labels the factor level
combinations for the special case where all h[i,i] are the same.
(PR#14837)
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.15.0:
SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:
o The behaviour of unlink(recursive = TRUE) for a symbolic link to
a directory has changed: it now removes the link rather than the
directory contents (just as rm -r does).
On Windows it no longer follows reparse points (including
junctions and symbolic links).
NEW FEATURES:
o Environment variable RD2DVI_INPUTENC has been renamed to
RD2PDF_INPUTENC.
o .Deprecated() becomes a bit more flexible, getting an old
argument.
o Even data-only packages without R code need a namespace and so
may need to be installed under R 2.14.0 or later.
o assignInNamespace() has further restrictions on use apart from at
top-level, as its help page has warned. Expect it to be disabled
from programmatic use in the future.
o system() and system2() when capturing output report a non-zero
status in the new "status" attribute.
o kronecker() now has an S4 generic in package methods on which
packages can set methods. It will be invoked by X %x% Y if
either X or Y is an S4 object.
o pdf() accepts forms like file = "|lpr" in the same way as
postscript().
o pdf() accepts file = NULL. This means that the device does NOT
create a PDF file (but it can still be queried, e.g., for font
metric info).
o format() (and hence print()) on "bibentry" objects now uses
options("width") to set the output width.
o legend() gains a text.font argument. (Suggested by Tim Paine,
PR#14719.)
o nchar() and nzchar() no longer accept factors (as integer
vectors). (Wish of PR#6899.)
o summary() behaves slightly differently (or more precisely, its
print() method does). For numeric inputs, the number of NAs is
printed as an integer and not a real. For dates and datetimes,
the number of NAs is included in the printed output (the latter
being the wish of PR#14720).
The "data.frame" method is more consistent with the default
method: in particular it now applies zapsmall() to
numeric/complex summaries.
o The number of items retained with options(warn = 0) can be set by
options(nwarnings=).
o There is a new function assignInMyNamespace() which uses the
namespace of the function it is called from.
o attach() allows the default name for an attached file to be
overridden.
o bxp(), the work horse of boxplot(), now uses a more sensible
default xlim in the case where at is specified differently from
1:n, see the discussion on R-devel, <URL:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2011-November/062586.html>.
o New function paste0(), an efficient version of paste(*, sep=""),
to be used in many places for more concise (and slightly more
efficient) code.
o Function setClass() in package methods now returns, invisibly, a
generator function for the new class, slightly preferred to
calling new(), as explained on the setClass help page.
o The "dendrogram" method of str() now takes its default for
last.str from option str.dendrogram.last.
o New simple fitted() method for "kmeans" objects.
o The traceback() function can now be called with an integer
argument, to display a current stack trace. (Wish of PR#14770.)
o setGeneric() calls can be simplified when creating a new generic
function by supplying the default method as the def argument.
See ?setGeneric.
o serialize() has a new option xdr = FALSE which will use the
native byte-order for binary serializations. In scenarios where
only little-endian machines are involved (these days, close to
universal) and (un)serialization takes an appreciable amount of
time this may speed up noticeably transferring data between
systems.
o The internal (un)serialization code is faster for long vectors,
particularly with XDR on some platforms. (Based on a suggested
patch by Michael Spiegel.)
o For consistency, circles with zero radius are omitted by points()
and grid.circle(). Previously this was device-dependent, but
they were usually invisible.
o NROW(x) and NCOL(x) now work whenever dim(x) looks appropriate,
e.g., also for more generalized matrices.
o PCRE has been updated to version 8.30.
o The internal R_Srcref variable is now updated before the browser
stops on entering a function. (Suggestion of PR#14818.)
o There are 'bare-bones' functions .colSums(), .rowSums(),
.colMeans() and .rowMeans() for use in programming where ultimate
speed is required.
o The formerly internal function .package_dependencies() from
package tools for calculating (recursive) (reverse) dependencies
on package databases has been renamed to package_dependencies()
and is now exported.
o There is a new function optimHess() to compute the (approximate)
Hessian for an optim() solution if hessian = TRUE was forgotten.
o .filled.contour() is a 'bare-bones' function to add a
filled-contour rectangular plot to an already prepared plot
region.
o The stepping in debugging and single-step browsing modes has
changed slightly: now left braces at the start of the body are
stepped over for if statements as well as for for and while
statements. (Wish of PR#14814.)
o library() no longer warns about a conflict with a function from
package:base if the function has the same code as the base one
but with a different environment. (An example is Matrix::det().)
o When deparsing very large language objects, as.character() now
inserts newlines after each line of approximately 500 bytes,
rather than truncating to the first line.
o New function rWishart() generates Wishart-distributed random
matrices.
o Packages may now specify actions to be taken when the package is
loaded (setLoadActions()).
o options(max.print = Inf) and similar now give an error (instead
of warnings later).
o The "difftime" replacement method of units tries harder to
preserve other attributes of the argument. (Wish of PR#14839.)
o poly(raw = TRUE) no longer requires more unique points than the
degree. (Requested by John Fox.)
PACKAGE parallel:
o There is a new function mcmapply(), a parallel version of
mapply(), and a wrapper mcMap(), a parallel version of Map().
o A default cluster can be registered by the new function
setDefaultCluster(): this will be used by default in functions
such as parLapply().
o clusterMap() has a new argument .scheduling to allow the use of
load-balancing.
o There are new load-balancing functions parLapplyLB() and
parSapplyLB().
o makePSOCKCluster() has a new option useXDR = FALSE which can be
used to avoid byte-shuffling for serialization when all the nodes
are known to be little-endian (or all big-endian).
PACKAGE INSTALLATION:
o Non-ASCII vignettes without a declared encoding are no longer
accepted.
o C/C++ code in packages is now compiled with -NDEBUG to mitigate
against the C/C++ function assert being called in production use.
Developers can turn this off during package development with
PKG_CPPFLAGS = -UNDEBUG.
o R CMD INSTALL has a new option --dsym which on Mac OS X (Darwin)
dumps the symbols alongside the .so file: this is helpful when
debugging with valgrind (and especially when installing packages
into R.framework). [This can also be enabled by setting the
undocumented environment variable PKG_MAKE_DSYM, since R 2.12.0.]
o R CMD INSTALL will test loading under all installed
sub-architectures even for packages without compiled code, unless
the flag --no-multiarch is used. (Pure R packages can do things
which are architecture-dependent: in the case which prompted
this, looking for an icon in a Windows R executable.)
o There is a new option install.packages(type = "both") which tries
source packages if binary packages are not available, on those
platforms where the latter is the default.
o The meaning of install.packages(dependencies = TRUE) has changed:
it now means to install the essential dependencies of the named
packages plus the Suggests, but only the essential dependencies
of dependencies. To get the previous behaviour, specify
dependencies as a character vector.
o R CMD INSTALL --merge-multiarch is now supported on OS X and
other Unix-alikes using multiple sub-architectures.
o R CMD INSTALL --libs-only now by default does a test load on
Unix-alikes as well as on Windows: suppress with --no-test-load.
UTILITIES:
o R CMD check now gives a warning rather than a note if it finds
inefficiently compressed datasets. With bzip2 and xz compression
having been available since R 2.10.0, it only exceptionally makes
sense to not use them.
The environment variable _R_CHECK_COMPACT_DATA2_ is no longer
consulted: the check is always done if _R_CHECK_COMPACT_DATA_ has
a true value (its default).
o Where multiple sub-architectures are to be tested, R CMD check
now runs the examples and tests for all the sub-architectures
even if one fails.
o R CMD check can optionally report timings on various parts of the
check: this is controlled by environment variable
_R_CHECK_TIMINGS_ documented in 'Writing R Extensions'. Timings
(in the style of R CMD BATCH) are given at the foot of the output
files from running each test and the R code in each vignette.
o There are new options for more rigorous testing by R CMD check
selected by environment variables - see the 'Writing R
Extensions' manual.
o R CMD check now warns (rather than notes) on undeclared use of
other packages in examples and tests: increasingly people are
using the metadata in the DESCRIPTION file to compute information
about packages, for example reverse dependencies.
o The defaults for some of the options in R CMD check (described in
the 'R Internals' manual) have changed: checks for unsafe and
.Internal() calls and for partial matching of arguments in R
function calls are now done by default.
o R CMD check has more comprehensive facilities for checking
compiled code and so gives fewer reports on entry points linked
into .so/.dll files from libraries (including C++ and Fortran
runtimes).
Checking compiled code is now done on FreeBSD (as well as the
existing supported platforms of Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and
Windows).
o R CMD build has more options for --compact-vignettes: see R CMD
build --help.
o R CMD build has a new option --md5 to add an MD5 file (as done by
CRAN): this is used by R CMD INSTALL to check the integrity of
the distribution.
If this option is not specified, any existing (and probably
stale) MD5 file is removed.
DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
o R CMD Rd2dvi is now defunct: use R CMD Rd2pdf.
o Options such --max-nsize, --max-vsize and the function
mem.limits() are now defunct. (Options --min-nsize and
--min-vsize remain available.)
o Use of library.dynam() without specifying all the first three
arguments is now disallowed.
Use of an argument chname in library.dynam() including the
extension .so or .dll (which was never allowed according to the
help page) is defunct. This also applies to
library.dynam.unload() and to useDynLib directives in NAMESPACE
files.
o The internal functions .readRDS() and .saveRDS() are now defunct.
o The off-line help() types "postscript" and "ps" are defunct.
o Sys.putenv(), replaced and deprecated in R 2.5.0, is finally
removed.
o Some functions/objects which have been defunct for five or more
years have been removed completely. These include .Alias(),
La.chol(), La.chol2inv(), La.eigen(), Machine(), Platform(),
Version, codes(), delay(), format.char(), getenv(), httpclient(),
loadURL(), machine(), parse.dcf(), printNoClass(), provide(),
read.table.url(), restart(), scan.url(), symbol.C(), symbol.For()
and unix().
o The ENCODING argument to .C() is deprecated. It was intended to
smooth the transition to multi-byte character strings, but can be
replaced by the use of iconv() in the rare cases where it is
still needed.
INSTALLATION:
o Building with a positive value of --with-valgrind-instrumentation
now also instruments logical, complex and raw vectors.
C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
o Passing R objects other than atomic vectors, functions, lists and
environments to .C() is now deprecated and will give a warning.
Most cases (especially NULL) are actually coding errors. NULL
will be disallowed in future.
.C() now passes a pairlist as a SEXP to the compiled code. This
is as was documented, but pairlists were in reality handled
differently as a legacy from the early days of R.
o call_R and call_S are deprecated. They still exist in the
headers and as entry points, but are no longer documented and
should not be used for new code.
BUG FIXES:
o str(x, width) now obeys its width argument also for function
headers and other objects x where deparse() is applied.
o The convention for x %/% 0L for integer-mode x has been changed
from 0L to NA_integer_. (PR#14754)
o The exportMethods directive in a NAMESPACE file now exports S4
generics as necessary, as the extensions manual said it does.
The manual has also been updated to be a little more informative
on this point.
It is now required that there is an S4 generic (imported or
created in the package) when methods are to be exported.
o Reference methods cannot safely use non-exported entries in the
namespace. We now do not do so, and warn in the documentation.
o The namespace import code was warning when identical S4 generic
functions were imported more than once, but should not (reported
by Brian Ripley, then Martin Morgan).
o merge() is no longer allowed (in some ways) to create a data
frame with duplicate column names (which confused PR#14786).
o Fixes for rendering raster images on X11 and Windows devices when
the x-axis or y-axis scale is reversed.
o getAnywhere() found S3 methods as seen from the utils namespace
and not from the environment from which it was called.
o selectMethod(f, sig) would not return inherited group methods
when caching was off (as it is by default).
o dev.copy2pdf(out.type = "cairo") gave an error. (PR#14827)
o Virtual classes (e.g., class unions) had a NULL prototype even if
that was not a legal subclass. See ?setClassUnion.
o The C prototypes for zdotc and zdotu in R_ext/BLAS.h have been
changed to the more modern style rather than that used by f2c.
(Patch by Berwin Turlach.)
o isGeneric() produced an error for primitives that can not have
methods.
o .C() or .Fortran() had a lack-of-protection error if the
registration information resulted in an argument being coerced to
another type.
o boxplot(x=x, at=at) with non finite elements in x and non integer
at could not generate a warning but failed.
o heatmap(x, symm=TRUE, RowSideColors=*) no longer draws the colors
in reversed order.
o predict(<ar>) was incorrect in the multivariate case, for p >= 2.
o print(x, max=m) is now consistent when x is a "Date"; also the
"reached ... max.print .." messages are now consistently using
single brackets.
o Closed the <li> tag in pages generated by Rd2HTML(). (PR#14841.)
o Axis tick marks could go out of range when a log scale was used.
(PR#14833.)
o Signature objects in methods were not allocated as S4 objects
(caused a problem with trace() reported by Martin Morgan).
variables, and customization should be done via INSTALL_ENV/MAKE_ENV
respectively. This also solves the internationalization issue fixed
in previous commit properly.
Noted by <joerg> on pkgsrc-changes@, many thanks!
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.14.2:
NEW FEATURES:
o The internal untar() (as used by default by R CMD INSTALL) now
knows about some pax headers which bsdtar (e.g., the default tar
for Mac OS >= 10.6) can incorrectly include in tar files, and
will skip them with a warning.
o Function compactPDF() in package tools now takes the default for
argument gs_quality from environment variable GS_QUALITY: there
is a new value "none", the ultimate default, which prevents
GhostScript being used in preference to qpdf just because
environment variable R_GSCMD is set. If R_GSCMD is unset or set
to "", the function will try to find a suitable GhostScript
executable.
o For consistency with the logLik() method, nobs() for "nls" files
now excludes observations with zero weight. (Reported by Berwin
Turlach.)
UTILITIES:
o R CMD check now reports by default on licenses not according to
the description in 'Writing R Extensions'.
o R CMD check has a new option --as-cran to turn on most of the
customizations that CRAN uses for its incoming checks.
PACKAGE INSTALLATION:
o R CMD INSTALL will now no longer install certain file types from
inst/doc: these are almost certainly mistakes and for some
packages are wasting a lot of space.
+ BUG FIXES
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.14.1:
NEW FEATURES:
o parallel::detectCores() is now able to find the number of
physical cores (rather than CPUs) on Sparc Solaris.
It can also do so on most versions of Windows; however the
default remains detectCores(logical = TRUE) on that platform.
o Reference classes now keep a record of which fields are locked.
$lock() with no arguments returns the names of the locked fields.
o HoltWinters() reports a warning rather than an error for some
optimization failures (where the answer might be a reasonable
one).
o tools::dependsOnPkg() now accepts the shorthand dependencies =
"all".
o parallel::clusterExport() now allows specification of an
environment from which to export.
o The quartz() device now does tilde expansion on its file
argument.
o Option print in Sweave's RweaveLatex() driver now emulates
auto-printing rather than printing (which can differ for an S4
object by calling show() rather than print()).
o filled.contour() now accepts infinite values: previously it might
have generated invalid graphics files (e.g. containing NaN
values).
+ BUG FIXES
environment. Note: some of the ones I'm adding may not be absolutely
required; I made this list by checking atimes after building R with
all tex stuff available, and confirmed that with (only) these packages
available it does build.
It doesn't help that the R makefile, apparently intentionally, doesn't
stop if running tex fails.
