The build system rolled up R-3.0.0.tar.gz (codename "Masked Marvel")
this morning.
The list below details the changes in this release.
You can get the source code from
http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-3/R-3.0.0.tar.gz
or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you.
Binaries for various platforms will appear in due course.
For the R Core Team
Peter Dalgaard
These are the md5sums for the freshly created files, in case you wish
to check that they are uncorrupted:
MD5 (AUTHORS) = cbf6da8f886ccd8d0dda0cc7ffd1b8ec
MD5 (COPYING) = eb723b61539feef013de476e68b5c50a
MD5 (COPYING.LIB) = a6f89e2100d9b6cdffcea4f398e37343
MD5 (FAQ) = 43fcae6a4c96e17313d11a0aaefb73f8
MD5 (INSTALL) = 37adac6d0fbadf25b5a40e3f7535415e
MD5 (NEWS) = ed5405acecb3ba4a2d9a3467bbcea7e5
MD5 (NEWS.html) = baea8a4f82a3aa9d29d1a73a34238aa1
MD5 (ONEWS) = 0c3e10eef74439786e5fceddd06dac71
MD5 (OONEWS) = b0d650eba25fc5664980528c147a20db
MD5 (R-latest.tar.gz) = 5fb80535b0e144a978f67aa2158015de
MD5 (README) = e259ae5dd943b8547f0b7719664e815b
MD5 (RESOURCES) = c7cb32499ebbf85deb064aab282f93a4
MD5 (THANKS) = d4b45e302b7cad0fc4bb50d2cfe69649
MD5 (R-3/R-3.0.0.tar.gz) = 5fb80535b0e144a978f67aa2158015de
This is the relevant part of the NEWS file
CHANGES IN R 3.0.0:
SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:
o Packages need to be (re-)installed under this version (3.0.0) of
R.
o There is a subtle change in behaviour for numeric index values
2^31 and larger. These never used to be legitimate and so were
treated as NA, sometimes with a warning. They are now legal for
long vectors so there is no longer a warning, and x[2^31] <- y
will now extend the vector on a 64-bit platform and give an error
on a 32-bit one.
o It is now possible for 64-bit builds to allocate amounts of
memory limited only by the OS. It may be wise to use OS
facilities (e.g. ulimit in a bash shell, limit in csh), to set
limits on overall memory consumption of an R process,
particularly in a multi-user environment. A number of packages
need a limit of at least 4GB of virtual memory to load.
64-bit Windows builds of R are by default limited in memory usage
to the amount of RAM installed: this limit can be changed by
command-line option --max-mem-size or setting environment
variable R_MAX_MEM_SIZE.
o Negative numbers for colours are consistently an error:
previously they were sometimes taken as transparent, sometimes
mapped into the current palette and sometimes an error.
NEW FEATURES:
o identical() has a new argument, ignore.environment, used when
comparing functions (with default FALSE as before).
o There is a new option, options(CBoundsCheck=), which controls how
.C() and .Fortran() pass arguments to compiled code. If true
(which can be enabled by setting the environment variable
R_C_BOUNDS_CHECK to yes), raw, integer, double and complex
arguments are always copied, and checked for writing off either
end of the array on return from the compiled code (when a second
copy is made). This also checks individual elements of character
vectors passed to .C().
This is not intended for routine use, but can be very helpful in
finding segfaults in package code.
o In layout(), the limits on the grid size have been raised
(again).
o New simple provideDimnames() utility function.
o Where methods for length() return a double value which is
representable as an integer (as often happens for package
Matrix), this is converted to an integer.
o Matrix indexing of dataframes by two-column numeric indices is
now supported for replacement as well as extraction.
o setNames() now has a default for its object argument, useful for
a character result.
o StructTS() has a revised additive constant in the loglik
component of the result: the previous definition is returned as
the loglik0 component. However, the help page has always warned
of a lack of comparability of log-likelihoods for non-stationary
models. (Suggested by Jouni Helske.)
o The logic in aggregate.formula() has been revised. It is now
possible to use a formula stored in a variable; previously, it
had to be given explicitly in the function call.
o install.packages() has a new argument quiet to reduce the amount
of output shown.
o Setting an element of the graphics argument lwd to a negative or
infinite value is now an error. Lines corresponding to elements
with values NA or NaN are silently omitted.
Previously the behaviour was device-dependent.
o Setting graphical parameters cex, col, lty, lwd and pch in par()
now requires a length-one argument. Previously some silently
took the first element of a longer vector, but not always when
documented to do so.
o Sys.which() when used with inputs which would be unsafe in a
shell (e.g. absolute paths containing spaces) now uses
appropriate quoting.
o as.tclObj() has been extended to handle raw vectors. Previously,
it only worked in the other direction. (Contributed by Charlie
Friedemann, PR#14939.)
o New functions cite() and citeNatbib() have been added, to allow
generation of in-text citations from "bibentry" objects. A
cite() function may be added to bibstyle() environments.
o A sort() method has been added for "bibentry" objects.
o The bibstyle() function now defaults to setting the default
bibliography style. The getBibstyle() function has been added to
report the name of the current default style.
o scatter.smooth() now has an argument lpars to pass arguments to
lines().
o pairs() has a new log argument, to allow some or all variables to
be plotted on logarithmic scale. (In part, wish of PR#14919.)
o split() gains a sep argument.
o termplot() does a better job when given a model with interactions
(and no longer attempts to plot interaction terms).
o The parser now incorporates code from Romain Francois' parser
package, to support more detailed computation on the code, such
as syntax highlighting, comment-based documentation, etc.
Functions getParseData() and getParseText() access the data.
o There is a new function rep_len() analogous to rep.int() for when
speed is required (and names are not).
o The undocumented use rep(NULL, length.out = n) for n > 0 (which
returns NULL) now gives a warning.
o demo() gains an encoding argument for those packages with
non-ASCII demos: it defaults to the package encoding where there
is one.
o strwrap() converts inputs with a marked encoding to the current
locale: previously it made some attempt to pass through as bytes
inputs invalid in the current locale.
o Specifying both rate and scale to [dpqr]gamma is a warning (if
they are essentially the same value) or an error.
o merge() works in more cases where the data frames include
matrices. (Wish of PR#14974.)
o optimize() and uniroot() no longer use a shared parameter object
across calls. (nlm(), nlminb() and optim() with numerical
derivatives still do, as documented.)
o The all.equal() method for date-times is now documented: times
are regarded as equal (by default) if they differ by up to 1
msec.
o duplicated() and unique() gain a nmax argument which can be used
to make them much more efficient when it is known that there are
only a small number of unique entries. This is done
automatically for factors.
o Functions rbinom(), rgeom(), rhyper(), rpois(), rnbinom(),
rsignrank() and rwilcox() now return integer (not double)
vectors. This halves the storage requirements for large
simulations.
o sort(), sort.int() and sort.list() now use radix sorting for
factors of less than 100,000 levels when method is not supplied.
So does order() if called with a single factor, unless na.last NA.
o diag() as used to generate a diagonal matrix has been re-written
in C for speed and less memory usage. It now forces the result
to be numeric in the case diag(x) since it is said to have 'zero
off-diagonal entries'.
o backsolve() (and forwardsolve()) are now internal functions, for
speed and support for large matrices.
o More matrix algebra functions (e.g. chol() and solve()) accept
logical matrices (and coerce to numeric).
o sample.int() has some support for n >= 2^31: see its help for the
limitations.
A different algorithm is used for (n, size, replace = FALSE, prob
= NULL) for n > 1e7 and size <= n/2. This is much faster and
uses less memory, but does give different results.
o approxfun() and splinefun() now return a wrapper to an internal
function in the stats namespace rather than a .C() or .Call()
call. This is more likely to work if the function is saved and
used in a different session.
o The functions .C(), .Call(), .External() and .Fortran() now give
an error (rather than a warning) if called with a named first
argument.
o Sweave() by default now reports the locations in the source
file(s) of each chunk.
o clearPushBack() is now a documented interface to a long-existing
internal call.
o aspell() gains filters for R code, Debian Control Format and
message catalog files, and support for R level dictionaries. In
addition, package utils now provides functions
aspell_package_R_files() and aspell_package_C_files() for spell
checking R and C level message strings in packages.
o bibentry() gains some support for "incomplete" entries with a
crossref field.
o gray() and gray.colors() finally allow alpha to be specified.
o monthplot() gains parameters to control the look of the reference
lines. (Suggestion of Ian McLeod.)
o Added support for new %~% relation ("is distributed as") in
plotmath.
o domain = NA is accepted by gettext() and ngettext(), analogously
to stop() etc.
o termplot() gains a new argument plot = FALSE which returns
information to allow the plots to be modified for use as part of
other plots, but does not plot them. (Contributed by Terry
Therneau, PR#15076.)
o quartz.save(), formerly an undocumented part of R.app, is now
available to copy a device to a quartz() device. dev.copy2pdf()
optionally does this for PDF output: quartz.save() defaults to
PNG.
o The default method of pairs() now allows text.panel = NULL and
the use of <foo>.panel = NULL is now documented.
o setRefClass() and getRefClass() now return class generator
functions, similar to setClass(), but still with the reference
fields and methods as before (suggestion of Romain Francois).
o New functions bitwNot(), bitwAnd(), bitwOr() and bitwXor(), using
the internal interfaces previously used for classes "octmode"
and
"hexmode".
Also bitwShiftL() and bitwShiftR() for shifting bits in elements
of integer vectors.
o New option "deparse.cutoff" to control the deparsing of language
objects such as calls and formulae when printing. (Suggested by
a comment of Sarah Goslee.)
o colors() gains an argument distinct.
o New demo(colors) and demo(hclColors), with utility functions.
o list.files() (aka dir()) gains a new optional argument no.. which
allows to exclude "." and ".." from listings.
o Multiple time series are also of class "matrix"; consequently,
head(), e.g., is more useful.
o encodeString() preserves UTF-8 marked encodings. Thus if factor
levels are marked as UTF-8 an attempt is made to print them in
UTF-8 in RGui on Windows.
o readLines() and scan() (and hence read.table()) in a UTF-8 locale
now discard a UTF-8 byte-order-mark (BOM). Such BOMs are allowed
but not recommended by the Unicode Standard: however Microsoft
applications can produce them and so they are sometimes found on
websites.
The encoding name "UTF-8-BOM" for a connection will ensure that
a
UTF-8 BOM is discarded.
o mapply(FUN, a1, ..) now also works when a1 (or a further such
argument) needs a length() method (which the documented arguments
never do). (Requested by Herv'e Pag`es; with a patch.)
o .onDetach() is supported as an alternative to .Last.lib. Unlike
.Last.lib, this does not need to be exported from the package's
namespace.
o The srcfile argument to parse() may now be a character string, to
be used in error messages.
o The format() method for ftable objects gains a method argument,
propagated to write.ftable() and print(), allowing more compact
output, notably for LaTeX formatting, thanks to Marius Hofert.
o The utils::process.events() function has been added to trigger
immediate event handling.
o Sys.which() now returns NA (not "") for NA inputs (related to
PR#15147).
o The print() method for class "htest" gives fewer trailing spaces
(wish of PR#15124).
Also print output from HoltWinters(), nls() and others.
o loadNamespace() allows a version specification to be given, and
this is used to check version specifications given in the Imports
field when a namespace is loaded.
o setClass() has a new argument, slots, clearer and less ambiguous
than representation. It is recommended for future code, but
should be back-compatible. At the same time, the allowed slot
specification is slightly more general. See the documentation
for details.
o mget() now has a default for envir (the frame from which it is
called), for consistency with get() and assign().
o close() now returns an integer status where available, invisibly.
(Wish of PR#15088.)
o The internal method of tar() can now store paths too long for the
ustar format, using the (widely supported) GNU extension. It can
also store long link names, but these are much less widely
supported. There is support for larger files, up to the ustar
limit of 8GB.
o Local reference classes have been added to package methods.
These are a technique for avoiding unneeded copying of large
components of objects while retaining standard R functional
behavior. See ?LocalReferenceClasses.
o untar() has a new argument restore_times which if false (not the
default) discards the times in the tarball. This is useful if
they are incorrect (some tarballs submitted to CRAN have times in
a local timezone or many years in the past even though the
standard required them to be in UTC).
o replayplot() cannot (and will not attempt to) replay plots
recorded under R < 3.0.0. It may crash the R session if an
attempt is made to replay plots created in a different build of R
>= 3.0.0.
o Palette changes get recorded on the display list, so replaying
plots (including when resizing screen devices and using
dev.copy()) will work better when the palette is changed during a
plot.
o chol(pivot = TRUE) now defaults to LAPACK, not LINPACK.
o The parse() function has a new parameter keep.source, which
defaults to options("keep.source").
o Profiling via Rprof() now optionally records information at the
statement level, not just the function level.
o The Rprof() function now quotes function names in in its output
file on Windows, to be consistent with the quoting in Unix.
o Profiling via Rprof() now optionally records information about
time spent in GC.
o The HTML help page for a package now displays non-vignette
documentation files in a more accessible format.
o To support options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE), model.frame(),
model.matrix() and replications() now automatically convert
character vectors to factors without a warning.
o The print method for objects of class "table" now detects tables
with 0-extents and prints the results as, e.g., < table of extent
0 x 1 x 2 >. (Wish of PR#15198.)
o Deparsing involving calls to anonymous functions and has been
made closer to reversible by the addition of extra parentheses.
o The function utils::packageName() has been added as a lightweight
version of methods::getPackageName().
o find.package(lib.loc = NULL) now treats loaded namespaces
preferentially in the same way as attached packages have been for
a long time.
o In Windows, the Change Directory dialog now defaults to the
current working directory, rather than to the last directory
chosen in that dialog.
o available.packages() gains a "license/restricts_use" filter
which
retains only packages for which installation can proceed solely
based on packages which are guaranteed not to restrict use.
o New check_packages_in_dir() function in package tools for
conveniently checking source packages along with their reverse
dependencies.
o R's completion mechanism has been improved to handle help
requests (starting with a question mark). In particular, help
prefixes are now supported, as well as quoted help topics. To
support this, completion inside quotes are now handled by R by
default on all platforms.
o The memory manager now allows the strategy used to balance
garbage collection and memory growth to be controlled by setting
the environment variable R_GC_MEM_GROW. See ?Memory for more
details.
o ('For experts only', as the introductory manual says.) The use
of environment variables R_NSIZE and R_VSIZE to control the
initial (= minimum) garbage collection trigger for number of cons
cels and size of heap has been restored: they can be overridden
by the command-line options --min-nsize and --min-vsize; see
?Memory.
o On Windows, the device name for bitmap devices as reported by
.Device and .Devices no longer includes the file name. This is
for consistency with other platforms and was requested by the
lattice maintainer.
win.metafile() still uses the file name: the exact form is used
by package tkrplot.
o set.seed(NULL) re-initializes .Random.seed as done at the
beginning of the session if not already set. (Suggestion of Bill
Dunlap.)
o The breaks argument in hist.default() can now be a function that
returns the breakpoints to be used (previously it could only
return the suggested number of breakpoints).
o File share/licenses/licenses.db has some clarifications,
especially as to which variants of 'BSD' and 'MIT' is
intended
and how to apply them to packages. The problematic licence
'Artistic-1.0' has been removed.
LONG VECTORS:
This section applies only to 64-bit platforms.
o There is support for vectors longer than 2^31 - 1 elements. This
applies to raw, logical, integer, double, complex and character
vectors, as well as lists. (Elements of character vectors remain
limited to 2^31 - 1 bytes.)
o Most operations which can sensibly be done with long vectors
work: others may return the error 'long vectors not supported
yet'. Most of these are because they explicitly work with
integer indices (e.g. anyDuplicated() and match()) or because
other limits (e.g. of character strings or matrix dimensions)
would be exceeded or the operations would be extremely slow.
o length() returns a double for long vectors, and lengths can be
set to 2^31 or more by the replacement function with a double
value.
o Most aspects of indexing are available. Generally double-valued
indices can be used to access elements beyond 2^31 - 1.
o There is some support for matrices and arrays with each dimension
less than 2^31 but total number of elements more than that. Only
some aspects of matrix algebra work for such matrices, often
taking a very long time. In other cases the underlying Fortran
code has an unstated restriction (as was found for complex
svd()).
o dist() can produce dissimilarity objects for more than 65536 rows
(but for example hclust() cannot process such objects).
o serialize() to a raw vector is unlimited in size (except by
resources).
o The C-level function R_alloc can now allocate 2^35 or more bytes.
o agrep() and grep() will return double vectors of indices for long
vector inputs.
o Many calls to .C() have been replaced by .Call() to allow long
vectors to be supported (now or in the future). Regrettably
several packages had copied the non-API .C() calls and so failed.
o .C() and .Fortran() do not accept long vector inputs. This is a
precaution as it is very unlikely that existing code will have
been written to handle long vectors (and the R wrappers often
assume that length(x) is an integer).
o Most of the methods for sort() work for long vectors.
rank(), sort.list() and order() support long vectors (slowly
except for radix sorting).
o sample() can do uniform sampling from a long vector.
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS:
o More use has been made of R objects representing registered entry
points, which is more efficient as the address is provided by the
loader once only when the package is loaded.
This has been done for packages base, methods, splines and tcltk:
it was already in place for the other standard packages.
Since these entry points are always accessed by the R entry
points they do not need to be in the load table which can be
substantially smaller and hence searched faster. This does mean
that .C / .Fortran / .Call calls copied from earlier versions of
R may no longer work - but they were never part of the API.
o Many .Call() calls in package base have been migrated to
.Internal() calls.
o solve() makes fewer copies, especially when b is a vector rather
than a matrix.
o eigen() makes fewer copies if the input has dimnames.
o Most of the linear algebra functions make fewer copies when the
input(s) are not double (e.g. integer or logical).
o A foreign function call (.C() etc) in a package without a PACKAGE
argument will only look in the first DLL specified in the
NAMESPACE file of the package rather than searching all loaded
DLLs. A few packages needed PACKAGE arguments added.
o The @<- operator is now implemented as a primitive, which should
reduce some copying of objects when used. Note that the operator
object must now be in package base: do not try to import it
explicitly from package methods.
PACKAGE INSTALLATION:
o The transitional support for installing packages without
namespaces (required since R 2.14.0) has been removed. R CMD
build will still add a namespace, but a .First.lib() function
will need to be converted.
R CMD INSTALL no longer adds a namespace (so installation will
fail), and a .First.lib() function in a package will be ignored
(with an installation warning for now).
As an exception, packages without a R directory and no NAMESPACE
file can still be installed.
o Packages can specify in their DESCRIPTION file a line like
Biarch: yes
to be installed on Windows with --force-biarch.
o Package vignettes can now be processed by other engines besides
Sweave; see 'Writing R Extensions' and the tools::vignetteEngine
help topic for details.
o The *.R tangled source code for vignettes is now included in
tarballs when R CMD build is used to produce them. In R 3.0.0,
*.R files not in the sources will be produced at install time,
but eventually this will be dropped.
o The package type "mac.binary" now looks in a path in the
repository without any Mac subtype (which used to be universal or
leopard): it looks in bin/macosx/contrib/3.0 rather than
bin/macosx/leopard/contrib/2.15). This is the type used for the
CRAN binary distribution for OS X as from R 3.0.0.
o File etc/Makeconf makes more use of the macros $(CC), $(CXX),
$(F77) and $(FC), so the compiler in use can be changed by
setting just these (and if necessary the corresponding flags and
FLIBS) in file ~/.R/Makevars.
This is convenient for those working with binary distributions of
R, e.g. on OS X.
UTILITIES:
o R CMD check now gives a warning rather than a note if it finds
calls to abort, assert or exit in compiled code, and has been
able to find the .o file in which the calls occur.
Such calls can terminate the R process which loads the package.
o The location of the build and check environment files can now be
specified by the environment variables R_BUILD_ENVIRON and
R_CHECK_ENVIRON, respectively.
o R CMD Sweave gains a --compact option to control possibly
reducing the size of the PDF file it creates when --pdf is given.
o R CMD build now omits Eclipse's .metadata directories, and R CMD
check warns if it finds them.
o R CMD check now does some checks on functions defined within
reference classes, including of .Call() etc calls.
o R CMD check --as-cran notes assignments to the global
environment, calls to data() which load into the global
environment, and calls to attach().
o R CMD build by default uses the internal method of tar() to
prepare the tarball. This is more likely to produce a tarball
compatible with R CMD INSTALL and R CMD check: an external tar
program, including options, can be specified _via_ the
environment variable R_BUILD_TAR.
o tools::massageExamples() is better protected against packages
which re-define base functions such as cat() and get() and so can
cause R CMD check to fail when checking examples.
o R CMD javareconf has been enhanced to be more similar to the code
used by configure.
There is now a test that a JNI program can be compiled (like
configure did) and only working settings are used.
It makes use of custom settings from configuration recorded in
etc/javaconf.
o The --no-vignettes argument of R CMD build has been renamed to
the more accurate --no-build-vignettes: its action has always
been to (re)build vignettes and never omitted them.
R CMD check accepts --no-build-vignettes as a preferred synonym
for --no-rebuild-vignettes.
DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
o The ENCODING argument to .C() is defunct. Use iconv() instead.
o The .Internal(eval.with.vis) non-API function has been removed.
o Support for the converters for use with .C() has been removed,
including the oft misused non-API header R_ext/RConverters.h.
o The previously deprecated uses of array() with a 0-length dim
argument and tapply() with a 0-length INDEX list are now errors.
o Translation packages are defunct.
o Calling rep() or rep.int() on a pairlist or other non-vector
object is now an error.
o Several non-API entry points have been transferred to packages
(e.g. R_zeroin2) or replaced by different non-API entry points
(e.g. R_tabulate).
o The 'internal' graphics device invoked by
.Call("R_GD_nullDevice", package = "grDevices") has
been removed:
use pdf(file = NULL) instead.
o The .Fortran() entry point "dqrls" which has not been used by R
since version 2.15.1 is no longer available.
o Functions traceOn() and traceOff() in package methods are now
defunct.
o Function CRAN.packages() is finally defunct.
o Use of col2rgb(0) is defunct: use par("bg") or NA instead.
o The long-defunct functions Rd_parse(), anovalist.lm(),
categpry(), clearNames(), gammaCody(), glm.fit.null(),
lm.fit.null(), lm.wfit.null(), manglePackageNames(),
mauchley.test(), package.contents(), print.coefmat(),
reshapeLong(), reshapeWide(), tkclose(), tkcmd(), tkfile.dir(),
tkfile.tail(), tkopen(), tkputs(), tkread(), trySilent() and
zip.file.extract() have been removed entirely (but are still
documented in the help system).
o The unused dataPath argument to attachNamespace() has been
removed.
o grid.prompt() has been removed: use devAskNewPage() instead.
o The long-deprecated intensities component is no longer returned
by hist().
o mean() for data frames and sd() for data frames and matrices are
defunct.
o chol(pivot = FALSE, LINPACK = TRUE), ch2inv(LINPACK = TRUE),
eigen(EISPACK = TRUE), solve(LINPACK = TRUE) and svd(LINPACK TRUE)
are defunct: LAPACK will be used, with a warning.
o The keep.source argument to library() and require() is defunct.
This option needs to be set at install time.
o Documentation for real(), as.real() and is.real() has been moved
to 'defunct' and the functions removed.
o The maxRasters argument of pdf() (unused since R 2.14.0) has been
removed.
o The unused fontsmooth argument has been removed from the quartz()
device.
o All the (non-API) EISPACK entry points in R have been removed.
o chol(pivot = TRUE, LINPACK = TRUE) is deprecated.
o The long-deprecated use of \synopsis in the Usage section of .Rd
files will be removed in R 3.1.0.
o .find.package() and .path.package() are deprecated: only the
public versions without the dot have ever been in the API.
o In a package's DESCRIPTION file,
License: X11
is deprecated, since it includes 'Copyright (C) 1996 X
Consortium' which cannot be appropriate for a current R package.
Use 'MIT' or 'BSD_2_clause' instead.
CODE MIGRATION:
o The C code underlying base graphics has been migrated to the
graphics package (and hence no longer uses .Internal() calls).
o Most of the .Internal() calls used in the stats package have been
migrated to C code in that package.
This means that a number of .Internal() calls which have been
used by packages no longer exist, including .Internal(cor)
.Internal(cov), .Internal(optimhess) and
.Internal(update.formula).
o Some .External() calls to the base package (really to the R
executable or shared library) have been moved to more appropriate
packages. Packages should not have been using such calls, but
some did (mainly those used by integrate()).
PACKAGE parallel:
o There is a new function mcaffinity() which allows getting or
setting the CPU affinity mask for the current R process on
systems that supports this (currently only Linux has been tested
successfully). It has no effect on systems which do not support
process affinity. Users are not expected to use this function
directly (with the exception of fixing libraries that break
affinity settings like OpenBLAS) - the function is rather
intended to support affinity control in high-level parallel
functions. In the future, R may supplement lack of affinity
control in the OS by its own bookkeeping via mcaffinity() related
to processes and threads it spawns.
o mcparallel() has a new argument mc.affinity which attempts to set
the affinity of the child process according to the specification
contained therein.
o The port used by socket clusters is chosen randomly: this should
help to avoid clashes observed when two users of a multi-user
machine try to create a cluster at the same time. To reproduce
the previous behaviour set environment variable R_PARALLEL_PORT
to 10187.
C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
o There has been some minor re-organization of the non-API header
files. In particular, Rinternals.h no longer includes the
non-API header R_exts/PrtUtil.h, and that no longer includes
R_exts/Print.h.
o Passing NULL to .C() is now an error.
o .C() and .Fortran() now warn if "single" arguments are used with
DUP = FALSE, as changes to such arguments are not returned to the
caller.
o C entry points R_qsort and R_qsort_I now have start and end as
size_t to allow them to work with longer vectors on 64-bit
platforms. Code using them should be recompiled.
o A few recently added C entry points were missing the remapping to
Rf_, notably [dpq]nbinom_mu.
o Some of the interface pointers formerly available only to R.app
are now available to front-ends on all Unix-alikes: one has been
added for the interface to View().
o PACKAGE = "" is now an error in .C() etc calls: it was always
contrary to the documentation.
o Entry point rcont2 has been migrated to package stats and so is
no longer available.
o R_SVN_REVISION in Rversion.h is now an integer (rather than a
string) and hence usable as e.g. #if R_SVN_REVISION < 70000.
o The entry points rgb2hsv and hsv2rgb have been migrated to
package grDevices and so are no longer available.
o R_GE_version has been increased to 10 and name2col removed (use
R_GE_str2col instead). R internal colour codes are now defined
using the typedef rcolor.
o The REPROTECT macro now checks that the protect index is valid.
o Several non-API entry points no longer used by R have been
removed, including the Fortran entry points chol, chol2inv, cg,
ch and rg, and the C entry points Brent_fmin, fft_factor and
fft_work.
o If a .External call is registered with a number of arguments
(other than -1), the number of arguments passed is checked for
each call (as for other foreign function calls).
o It is now possible to write custom connection implementations
outside core R using R_ext/Connections.h. Please note that the
implementation of connections is still considered internal and
may change in the future (see the above file for details).
INTERNATIONALIZATION:
o The management of translations has been converted to R code: see
?tools::update_pkg_po.
o The translations for the R interpreter and RGui.exe are now part
of the base package (rather than having sources in directory po
and being installed to share/locale). Thus the base package
supports three translation domains, R-base, R and RGui.
o The compiled translations which ship with R are all installed to
the new package translations for easier updating. The first
package of that name found on .libPaths() at the start of the R
session will be used. (It is possible messages will be used
before .libPaths() is set up in which case the default
translations will be used: set environment variable
R_TRANSLATIONS to point to the location of the intended
translations package to use this right from the start.)
o The translations form a separate group in the Windows installer,
so can be omitted if desired.
o The markup for many messages has been changed to make them easier
to translate, incorporating suggestions from Lukasz Daniel.
INSTALLATION:
o There is again support for building without using the C 'long
double' type. This is required by C99, but system
implementations can be slow or flawed. Use configure option
--disable-long-double.
o make pdf and make install-pdf now make and install the full
reference index (including all base and recommended packages).
o The 'reference manual' on the Windows GUI menu and included in
the installer is now the full reference index, including all base
and recommended packages.
o R help pages and manuals have no ISBNs because ISBN rules no
longer allow constantly changing content to be assigned an ISBN.
o The Windows installer no longer installs a Start Menu link to the
static help pages; as most pages are generated dynamically, this
led to a lot of broken links.
o Any custom settings for Java configuration are recorded in file
etc/javaconf for subsequent use by R CMD javareconf.
o There is now support for makeinfo version 5.0 (which requires a
slightly different .texi syntax).
o The minimum versions for --use-system-zlib and --use-system-pcre
are now tested as 1.2.5 and 8.10 respectively.
o On Windows, the stack size is reduced to 16MB on 32-bit systems:
misguided users were launching many threads without controlling
the stack size.
o configure no longer looks for file ~/.Rconfig: ~/.R/config has
long been preferred.
BUG FIXES:
o When R CMD build is run in an encoding other than the one
specified in the package's DESCRIPTION file it tries harder to
expand the authors at R field in the specified encoding. (PR#14958)
o If R CMD INSTALL is required to expand the authors at R field of the
DESCRIPTION file, it tries harder to do so in the encoding
specified for the package (rather than using ASCII escapes).
o Fix in package grid for pushing a viewport into a layout cell,
where the layout is within a viewport that has zero physical
width OR where the layout has zero total relative width (likewise
for height). The layout column widths (or row heights) in this
case were being calculated with non-finite values. (Reported by
Winston Chang.)
o solve(A, b) for a vector b gave the answer names from colnames(A)
for LINPACK = TRUE but not in the default case.
o La.svd() accepts logical matrices (as documented, and as svd()
did).
o legend() now accepts negative pch values, in the same way
points() long has.
o Parse errors when installing files now correctly display the name
of the file containing the bad code.
o In Windows, tcltk windows were not always properly constructed.
(PR#15150)
o The internal functions implementing parse(), tools::parseLatex()
and tools::parse_Rd() were not reentrant, leading to errors in
rare circumstances such as a garbage collection triggering a
recursive call.
o Field assignments in reference class objects via $<- were not
being checked because the magic incantation to turn methods on
for that primitive operator had been inadvertently omitted.
o setHook(hookname, value, action="replace") set the hook to be
the
value, rather than a list containing the value as documented.
(PR#15167)
o If a package used a NEWS.Rd file, the main HTML package index
page did not link to it. (Reported by Dirk Eddelbuettel.)
o The primitive implementation of @<- was not checking the class of
the replacement. It now does a check, quicker but less general
than slot<-. See the help.
o split(x, f) now recycles classed objects x in the same way as
vectors. (Reported by Martin Morgan.)
o pbeta(.28, 1/2, 2200, lower.tail=FALSE, log.p=TRUE) is no longer
-Inf; ditto for corresponding pt() and pf() calls, such as pt(45,
df=5000, lower.tail=FALSE, log.p=TRUE). (PR#15162)
o The Windows graphics device would crash R if a user attempted to
load the graphics history from a variable that was not a saved
history. (PR#15230)
o The workspace size for the predict() method for loess() could
exceed the maximum integer size. (Reported by Hiroyuki
Kawakatsu.)
o ftable(x, row.vars, col.vars) now also works when the *.vars
arguments are (integer or character vectors) of length zero.
o Calling cat() on a malformed UTF-8 string could cause the Windows
GUI to lock up. (PR#15227)
o removeClass(cc) gave "node stack overflow" for some class
definitions containing "array" or "matrix".
--
Peter Dalgaard, Professor
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
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