R announce - Jun 2000 - New version of chron

A new version of the chron add-on package is now available from CRAN.

The previous version introduced code to ensure that chron would work
correctly in the 21st century.  Of course, the main issue is how to deal
with 2-digit dates.  To this end, the original author of chron, David
James, indicated that the `y' format specifier was always meant to
specify the year without the century (i.e., the year modulo 100), as in
strftime(3)'s `%y'.  Hence, there should be an error when using a number
outside the [0, 99] range, such as 1999 or 2000, with the `y' format
specifier.

Several users have expressed their dislike of the new behavior and that
using `y' with 4-digit years used to work, sort of.  Hence, the new
versions has changed the default behavior as follows.  2-digit years are
expanded using 30 as century cutoff, i.e.

	00 -> 29		21st century
	30 -> 99		20th century

All other values are left alone.

In the next version, I want to introduce strftime(3) formatting specs,
similar to the new timeDate class in S-PLUS 5.  Most likely, ISO 8601
format (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss) will be used as default.

-kh

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R folks:

What is the procedure for installing the chron package with R 1.2.1
for Windows?  I have downloaded chron_2_2-8_tar.gz from CRAN,
but the installer program (rwinst.exe) wants a .zip file and I was
unable to locate one at the CRAN site.

I also tried extracting the tar.gz file with winzip directly to the folder
C:\Program Files\R Language\rw1021\library.  However that results
in:
> library(chron)
Warning message:
Package  `chron' contains no R code in: library(chron)

Thanks for any advice.


Jack Lewis                           Redwood Sciences Laboratory
707-825-2929 voice                   Pacific Southwest Research Station
707-825-2901 fax                     USDA Forest Service
jl7001 at axe.humboldt.edu              http://www.rsl.psw.fs.fed.us
jlewis01 at fs.fed.us (alternate)

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