[R] R-1.8.1 is released

Peter Dalgaard
Fri, 21 Nov 2003 12:45:53 -0000

I've rolled up R-1.8.1.tgz a short while ago. This is a patch version
mostly fixing a number of issues in 1.8.0, some of which were quite
serious. As usual, a few new features have crept in as well. (See below
for details.)

You can get it from

http://cran.us.r-project.org/src/base/R-1.8.1.tgz

or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you. Binaries
for various platforms will appear in due course.

There is also a version split for floppies.

These are the md5sums for the freshly created files, in case you wish
to check that they are uncorrupted:

cd81fdeaf22f93dfc28979e8132722ec  R-1.8.1.tgz
5690ed4e1f453115551122facb4b34b0  R-1.8.1.tgz-split.aa
cd2fd749085c1e63fce22e3e09f70cdb  R-1.8.1.tgz-split.ab
ab0b08746d1f5bd56a736a8b1f5bfee6  R-1.8.1.tgz-split.ac
41332e09272598bfb64c25ac84274404  R-1.8.1.tgz-split.ad
51d3f4e376efdee4ae069b135f909621  R-1.8.1.tgz-split.ae
c50f27fdf41c44c71c5b4f285a2dd98f  R-1.8.1.tgz-split.af
2eb71e8a54e41b3e30e3e40f35151aa0  R-1.8.1.tgz-split.ag

On behalf of the R Core Team,

        Peter Dalgaard


Here's the relevant part of the NEWS file


		CHANGES IN R VERSION 1.8.1


NEW FEATURES

    o	There is now a "Complex" S3 group generic (a side-effect of
	fixing up the corresponding S4 group generic).

    o	help("regex") now gives a description of the regular expressions
	used in R.

    o	The startup message now shows the R Foundation as copyright
	holder, and includes the R ISBN number and a pointer to the new
	citation() function.

    o	The solve() function now uses the `tol' argument for all
	non-complex cases.  The default tolerance for LINPACK is 1e-7,
	as before.  For LAPACK it currently is .Machine$double.eps but
	may be changed in later versions of R.

    o	help.search() now defaults to agrep = FALSE when keyword= is
	specified, since no one wants fuzzy matching of categories.

    o	Function texi2dvi() in package tools can be used to compile
	latex files from within R.

    o	Objects with formal S4 classes saved in pre-1.8 versions and
	loaded into the current version have incompatible class
	attributes (no package information).  A new function,
	fixPre1.8() in package methods, will fix the class attributes.
	See the help for this function.

    o	heatmap() allows Rowv/Colv = NA, suppressing the corresponding
	dendrogram.

    o   An "antifeature": Tcl 8.0 is now officially unsupported. In
1.8.0
	it just didn't work. This very old version lacks several features
        that are needed for the new version of the tcltk package. R will
	still build the tcltk package against Tcl 8.0 but the resulting
	package will not load.


BUG FIXES

    o	symnum(x) now behaves as documented when length(x) == 0 and uses
	lower.triangular = FALSE for logical arrays.

    o	c() now has a method for "noquote" objects and hence works as
	expected.

    o	split(1:10, c(1,2)) no longer gives a spurious warning.

    o	The "Complex" S4 group generic now works.

    o	abbreviate() doesn't get into infinite loops on input that differs
	only by leading/trailing space

    o	Added check for user interrupt in Rvprintf to allow printing to be
	interrupted.

    o	Fixed bug that would cause segfault on protect stack overflow.

    o	crossprod() on matrices with zero extents would return an
	uninitialized matrix (rather than one filled with zeros).

    o	DF[[i,j]] for a data frame used row j and col i, not as intended
	row i and col j.

    o	Even more user errors in recursive indexing of lists are now
	caught.	 (PR#4486)

    o	cor(<matrix>, use = "pairwise") gave wrong result in 1.8.0
(only).
	(PR#4646)

    o	merge.data.frame() could give incorrect names when one of the
	arguments had only one column.	(PR#4299)

    o	Subsetting a one-dimensional array dropped dimensions even when
	they were not of length one.  (Related to PR#4110)

    o	The plot() method for `ecdf' objects, plot.ecdf(), now allows to
	set a `ylab' argument (different from the default).

    o	cor.test(*, method="spearman") gave wrong results `randomly'
	(because of a wrong type passed to C; PR#4718).

    o	dist() objects with NA's didn't print these, now do. (PR#4866).

    o	regexpr(fixed = TRUE) returned 0-based indices.

    o	df[, length_1_index] <- value did not recycle short rhs. (PR#4820)

    o	median() no longer `works' for odd-length factor variables.

    o	packageStatus() is more robust to failing to contact a
	repository, and contacts the correct paths in the repositories
	under Windows.

    o	.setOldIs (methods) contained a typo stopping POSIXct objects (etc)
	being included in formal classes.

    o	terms() sometimes removed offset() terms incorrectly, since it
	counted by variables and not terms.  Its "offset" attribute
	was incorrectly documented as referring to terms not
	variables. (Related to PR#4941)

    o	buildVignettes() and pkgVignettes() in package tools are now
	documented.  The call to texi2dvi is wrapped in the new
	function texi2dvi() which also works on Windows.

    o   hclust() was sometimes not finding the correct inter-cluster
	distances with non-monotone methods.  (PR#4195)

    o   plot.hclust() now tolerates mode changes on dumped objects. (PR#4361)

    o   prompt() no longer insists files are in the current directory.
	(PR#4978)

    o   filter() did not use init in reverse order as documented. (PR#5017)

    o	contrasts<-() and model.matrix() now have sanity checks that
	factors having at least 2 levels (or one level and a contrast
	matrix): model.matrix() gave nonsensical results for 0-level
	factors.

    o   writeChar() could segfault if more characters were requested
	than exist. (PR#5090)

    o	round() and signif() dropped attributes with 0-length inputs,
	only. (PR#4710)

    o	The default graphics device in the GNOME interface was gtk,
	which is no longer in the base package. It is now X11.

    o	The print button on the toolbar of the GNOME graphics device
	did not work.

    o	The example code on the man page for TkWidgetcmds had not been
	updated after the change that made tkget (et al.) return
	tclObj objects, so the "Submit" button didn't work.

    o	Rd conversion to latex did not add a new line before
	\end{Section} for the section environments, which caused
	problems if the last thing in a section was \preformatted{}
	(and potentially elsewhere).

    o	Under some circumstances mosaicplot() failed if main was
	supplied as it was passed on to model.frame.default().

    o	Conversion to POSIXlt (including printing) of POSIXct dates
	before 1902 and after 2038 computed which were leap years from
	(year-1900) so got some xx00 years wrong.


--
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907

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