We made support for a sufficiently general iconv 'essential' in R 2.5.0 and have been giving configure warnings on --without-iconv ever since. We originally announced that --without-iconv would be available in 2.5.x only. The delay in making iconv compulsory was down to problems with installing GNU iconv from public repositories on AIX and 64-bit Solaris, but both are now resolved (see the latest R-admin manual, in R-patched or R-devel). So we now propose to make iconv compulsory as from R 2.10.0. If anyone has a compelling reason why this would cause difficulties, please post a deatialed case during the next week. -- Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595