************************************************** * Windows-specific changes to R * * See the file NEWS for changes that * * affect all versions of R. * ************************************************** ************************************************** * * * 2.11 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.11.1 patched BUG FIXES o file.rename() now waits for the rename to complete before returning, so that operations on the new filename will not fail. o Sys.info() and win.version() now report Windows 7 as such (and not as Vista), and Sys.info() now reports the machine type as 'x86-64' on 64-bit platforms. o serialize() to a raw vector works around the dismal performance of Windows' memory manager by allocating much larger chunks of memory less frequently. o readClipboard() could cause a segfault with certain clipboard data. o A fix intended for Mac OS X was incorrectly applied to Windows, so iconv(x, from, "") in a C locale was interpreted as requesting translation to UTF-8. o system(intern=TRUE) often returned 0 rather than an error status if the command could not be found, if run from Rterm or from Rgui with show.output.on.console = FALSE. o memory.limit() did not allow sizes greater than 4095 even on 64 bit builds. (PR#14372) CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.11.1 NEW FEATURES o The Rgui console, pagers and editor on the 64-bit build now have a title bar icon. o The outer frame/console for Rgui/Rterm mentions '(64-bit)' to make it easier to distinguish running copies of R. o The package entries in listbox shown by the 'Install package(s) ...' menu are now explicitly sorted in the current locale (there were in most previous releases, but not in 2.11.0). o R CMD INSTALL can install zipfiles as binary packages. o Errors in the Rconsole file are ignored: silently on startup, with a warning when Rconsole is loaded interactively. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.11.0 NEW FEATURES o There is now a native x64 Windows port, with a binary installer and binaries of packages available on CRAN. See the 'R Administration and Installation Manual' and the 'R for Windows FAQ'. o 'Rcmd cmd' (or 'R CMD cmd') now runs an arbitrary 'cmd' if 'cmd' is not one of the builtin commands, and does not have extension '.sh' or '.pl' (when it is run as a shell or Perl script respectively). This is done by passing 'cmd' to the command interpreter determined by the COMSPEC environment variable (which in a vanilla Windows system points to cmd.exe). o X11() and x11() gain additional arguments to be more similar to the Unix X11() device. o file.rename() can work across volumes (by copy-and-delete). o The main HTML help page now links to this CHANGES file. (Suggested by Henrik Bengtsson.) o strftime(format = "%z") now gives the timezone names used by the Olson database and not those used by Windows. o iconv(to = "ASCII") no longer transliterates, but iconv(to = "ASCII//TRANSLIT") will. This makes tools::showNonASCII() work the same way as on other platforms. o readRegistry() can look at either the 32- or 64-bit view of the Registry on 64-bit Windows. INSTALLATION o The Tcl timezone files (3Mb on disc) are now an optional part of the installation: they would be very rarely used with R. o RSetReg.exe has been updated to (un)set the version-specific keys in the same way as the main installer, and to have the optional argument /Personal to (un)set the per-user rather than the per-machine keys (which need administrative access). o When building R, the recommended way is now to supply a file R_HOME/src/gnuwin32/MkRules.local instead of editing MkRules: there is now no MkRules file in the distribution, but one is generated during the build process. MkRules.local can be generated by copying and editing MkRules.dist. o The MSI installer defaults to an all-user (per machine) install (by setting the ALLUSERS property to 1). This can be changed at installation, and it can be built for a user-mode install (see MkRules.dist). BUG FIXES o Using ESC to interrupt a system() call could cause R to become unstable. o 0^1i (which should be complex NAN) was incorrect. ************************************************** * * * 2.10 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.10.1 patched BUG FIXES o Some of the MDI toolbar buttons (e.g. "Open Script") did not return the focus to the console if the user cancelled the action. o system() (and hence shell()) did not set the standard file handles properly, so some programs would not run. o setWinProgressBar() did not check the type of its 'title' and 'label' arguments and might have crashed if they were mis-specified. It now does, thanks to a report by Greg Snow. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.10.1 BUG FIXES o The installer did not properly record help type choices in R_HOME/etc/Rprofile.site. o Rcmd INSTALL once again uses --no-restore, for consistency with the Unix version and R 2.9.2. o The HTML package index was not constructed properly when the library path was specified with backslashes. (Patch submitted by Gabor Grothendieck.) CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.10.0 NEW FEATURES o windows() now has a parameter fillOddEven (default TRUE), which controls the mode used for polygon fills of self- intersecting shapes. o The functions arrangeWindows() and getWindowsHandles() have been added to give more programmatic control to the appearance of windows in an R session. o A Windows menu has been added to the SDI version of the R GUI, and the corresponding menu in the MDI version has been expanded slightly. o The libpng library has been updated to version 1.2.40. o The remaining Perl scripts build, check, Rprof, Sd2Rd in R_HOME/bin now have extension .pl. o Rcmd (or R CMD) can now run .sh (shell) and .pl (Perl) scripts anywhere on the path (as well as .bat and .exe files as before). PACKAGE INSTALLATION o Rcmd SHLIB (which is used by Rcmd INSTALL) now calls 'make' without a target, rather than target 'all'. This is now the same as on Unix, and was announced in the NEWS for 2.9.0. o Help files are no longer zipped: rendering as text, HTML, latex or examples is now done when needed. Options --use-zip and --use-zip-help in R CMD INSTALL are no longer available and --auto-zip only zips data (or not). Help in packages installed under 2.9.x may not work correctly, and a warning is given when such a package is attached by library(). Re-installation of all packages is strongly recommended (use update.packages(checkBuilt = TRUE)). Binary packages are installed without CHM help if they contain it (as those intended for 2.9.x may). o It is possible to install source packages without Rtools provided they have no compiled code and no configure.win or cleanup.win script. INSTALLATION o Support for memory profiling is enabled in a standard build (this can be changed by editing config.h). o CHM help is no longer supported. o The help default for the standard installer is HTML help rather than CHM help. o The categories in the installers have been simplified. Now the files to support installation of source packages are always installed (they are now only 0.7Mb), and there are no longer categories 'chtml', 'html/help', 'latex' and 'Rd'. BUG FIXES o 'Rcmd open' now works as documented: previously 'Rcmd open.exe' was required. o cat(x, file=) in Rgui tried to interpret UTF-8-encoded strings for the console rather than converting them to the native encoding. ************************************************** * * * 2.9 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.9.2 patched BUG FIXES o If a nonstandard font were specified in Rconsole, the GUI preferences dialog would crash R. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.9.2 NEW FEATURES o The --internet2 command line option sets a flag internally; that flag is now visible and controllable from R using the setInternet2() function. o file.access() proved unreliable on some network-mounted file systems (probably a Samba issue), so it has been replaced in R CMD INSTALL by a directory creation test. (Reported by Simon Urbanek and Ruth Ripley.) o Sys.glob() attempts to handle UNC paths starting with \\ (which according to the globbing rules is escaped \), thanks to a patch from Tony Plate. BUG FIXES o Topics marked as "internal" in help files were not visible from CHM help. o The bmp(), jpeg(), png() and tiff() devices were not scaling 'pointsize' correctly with the resolution, for grid-based plots (e.g. those from lattice) only. These devices were scaling 'width' by res=1 if units="mm". CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.9.1 BUG FIXES o memory.limit(size) gave a spurious error message. o file.choose() and the save console dialog did not set the file filters properly. o Rcmd INSTALL --build in 2.9.0 did not make _bundles_ in the format install.packages() expected. o Calling setWinProgressBar() on a closed bar gives an error message, rather than crashing R. (PR#13709) o sprintf("%a") works better in some cases thanks to a patch to trio from Ei-ji Nakama. o Scrolling controls (e.g. from View() and edit()) did not handle large line counts well. o capabilities("tiff") was incorrectly being reported as FALSE (due to an error in the Windows-specific config.h file). CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.9.0 NEW FEATURES o memory.size() and memory.limit() now return rounded values. o The Rgui preferences dialog now allows more flexible colour settings, and shows a sample of what will be displayed. o The file selection items on Rgui's File menu now work in Unicode and so allow filenames not in the current encoding to be selected. o file.choose() and choose.files() now work with Unicode file names, so are able to select filenames not in the current encoding. (Note that we do not expect to handle directory paths not in the current encoding and they will not be retained as the current search directory.) o The script editor is now able to open files with names which are not in the current encoding: however the title displayed will replace invalid bytes by '?'. o file() and pipe() now open non-ASCII pathnames as Unicode: this helps if R is running in a character set different from that used by Windows. o help(topic, offline=TRUE) now creates a file called .tex, rather than Rdoc.tex. o The trio library has been updated to version 1.13. o New function msgWindow() to allow a windows() device or the Rgui console to be minimized, maximize or restored and (not the console) hidden, and to have recording turned on or off. o Rcmd SHLIB now uses the same code as on a Unix-alike, and so has some extra options. o iconv() is now done by a version of Yukihiro Nakadaira's win_iconv rather than by libiconv. This version is based on Windows' codepages and is not quite as comprehensive as libiconv: it is however much smaller and easier to maintain. The implementation here is 100% compatible: you can drop in libiconv's iconv.dll as a replacement if you need it, from http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/Riconv.dll. To avoid name conflicts with Gtk+, it has been renamed to Riconv.dll. o Completions in Rgui when selected from a list are now coloured as user input rather than R output (wish of PR#13562). o Omegahat is no longer offered as a repository for binary packages, as the latest versions it had were for R 2.7.x. INSTALLATION o The installer now checks for Windows 2000 or later. o There is a new component, 'Test files', which if selected will install the package-specific tests and some generic tests. Functions testInstalledPackages() and testInstalledBasic() in package 'tools'can be used to test these. o Support for cross-building has been withdrawn. UTILITIES o RSetReg's name for the version-specific Registry entry in development versions of R now matches that of the R installer. PACKAGE INSTALLATION o The way packages are installed has been overhauled to be much closer to the Unix version: for example Rcmd SHLIB is used to build DLLs (unless there is a src/Makefile.win). This means that various private variables and files that some packages used are no longer available, notably DPKG (the documented variable was and is R_PACKAGE_DIR) and MkRules (use etc/Makeconf). o Rcmd INSTALL now supports the same option names as the Unix-alike version: use 'Rcmd INSTALL --help' for details. In particular, --docs is replaced by --no-docs, --no-text, --no-html, --no-latex, --no-example and --no-chm. o Since iconv.dll has been renamed, packages wanting to link against it need to use -lRiconv (or, hetter, use the entry points in R_exts/Riconv.h). CUSTOMIZATION o The name of the producer can be changed in installer/Makefile and front-ends/RSetReg.c. ************************************************** * * * 2.8 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.8.1 patched BUG FIXES o getwd() could segfault (PR#13424). o dir() does a better job when dir is of rhe form "d:", the currrent directory is not the root on that drive, and either 'full' or 'recursive' is true. o Sys.setenv() since R 2.7.0 was limited to 1023 characters for the name+value, and silently truncated the value otherwise. It should now work up to the Windows limit (which is version-dependent). CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.8.1 NEW FEATURES o R_HOME/bin/helpPRINT.bat now contains an example of use with MiKTeX to produce a PDF version of the help file. o Rcmd INSTALL has a new option --pkglock to allow a per-package lock directory (useful for parallel installs). BUG FIXES o The windows() device now works around the total clipping of semi-transparent rectangles and circles that extend outside the device region. o The script editor did not respect user preferences for the background colour. o normalizePath() no longer returns a garbage string when the input is bad; it now signals an error. (PR#13199) o File share/sh/dcf.sh was not distributed with the binary build. (PR#13200) o dir.create() did not print the path correctly in warning messages. o The C-level function consolecmd had been broken in non-Latin-1 single-byte locales in R 2.8.0 by changes intended to support the Japanese IME. This affected some menu items in Rgui (e.g. to source R files with non-Latin-1 names) and submitting commands from the script editor, but only in rarer encodings such as Central European, Greek and Cyrillic. (PR#13195, probably also PR#13120) o The attempt to make the 'Load' button in the GUI preferences start in the home directory failed if the latter was specified with forward slashes, and reset the current search directory for other file open dialogs (e.g. for opening a script). o The installer would sometimes write the current version information to the registry even if that option was not checked. o Rcmd INSTALL --with-package-versions now works in a few more cases (of lazy loading and lazy data), but still many of the options are not supported (e.g. --use-zip). Versioned installs are now deprecated, so regard them as unsupported on Windows (and a warning is given). (PR#13284) CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.8.0 NEW FEATURES o Rterm --ess sets stdout to be unbuffered, as it would be for output to a terminal. o windows() gains a new argument 'clickToConfirm', default TRUE, which controls if new-frame confirmation is done via clicking (or ENTER) on the window (the recent default) or via a question in the console (the default for other interactive devices). The non-default behaviour may be useful when R is driven indirectly (e.g. via ESS) and for some Rterm users. o If the HOME environment variable is not set, Rgui and Rterm will set it to match R_USER (as Rcmd does). o The graphics devices bmp, jpeg, png, tiff and win.metafile perform tilde-expansion on their 'filename' argument. Also savePlot. UTILITIES o Rcmd sets many more enviroment variables, including all those set by R CMD under a Unix-alike which make sense on Windows. o Rcmd now follows a similar strategy to R when finding a valid TMPDIR setting: it tries TMPDIR, TMP, TEMP and R_USER looking for a directory -- the last will succeed as it does for R. o Rcmd has a new utility open.exe to open files via their file associations. o Rcmd Rd2dvi now opens .dvi and .pdf files via their file associations (if set -- MiKTeX sets 'yap' for .dvi). o Rcmd check now checks the latex of any package vignettes if texi2dvi (presumably from MiKTeX) is found on the path. o Package checking (including 'make check') is no longer done in a C locale but in the current locale (although LANGUAGE=en is used). o Rproxy.dll is no longer part of the R distribution: it has been replaced by CRAN package rscproxy. BUG FIXES o winDialog() and winDialogString() check that they are being used in an interactive session. o The Korean translation of the Rgui menus has been corrected and restored. (Thanks to June Kim and Seung-ho Kang.) o The list of hives in the readRegistry() defaults contained a typo; error messages were incomplete. (PR#12937) o The custom install options were not saved/restored when the installer was run with /SAVEINF or /LOADINF respectively. o savePlot() expected 'filename' in the native encoding. ************************************************** * * * 2.7 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.7.2 patched BUG FIXES o iconv() was incorrectly identifying R running in an Eastern European locale as using ISO-8859-2 (aka Latin-2) rather than CP1250: they differ in the positions of some characters, notably s and z with caron. This was seen in tcltk output from Rcmdr in 2.7.x, but might have occurred elsewhere (and earlier). This also affected localeToCharset() which incorrectly returned "ISO8859-2". The same issue seems to have caused problems with starting R 2.7.x in the Chinese (Hong Kong S.A.R.) locale on some systems (e.g. PR#12658): the problems were with locale names which contained periods. o dir.create(recursive = TRUE) was not working on //server/share paths. o The clip region was sometimes wrong when printing from the menu on a windows() graphics device (in 2.7.2 only). o The windows() device would sometimes ignore font family requests (PR#12931). CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.7.2 NEW FEATURES o Rgui has a new menu item 'Html search page' on the Help menu, which goes directly to the HTML search form. This is needed by users of Firefox 3, which generates incorrect links in search results when the page is accessed via the 'Html help' menu item (or via help.start()). BUG FIXES o Saving a graph in TIFF format could crash R (PR#11804). o Rterm in interactive use did not implement R_FlushConsole() fully. o getGraphicsEvent() did not return onMouseMove events while a mouse button was depressed. o The confirmation of a new frame for a windows() graphics device works harder to give the device focus, including bringing it to the top. o glob (used by Sys.glob() and unlink()) was not working correctly on some filename patterns including non-ASCII characters. Part of the problem was specific to 2.7.[01], part has existed since 2.5.0. o Sys.glob() returned a UTF-8 result in 2.7.[01] but failed to mark its encoding. o User menus were not properly removed when a graph window was closed. o Rscript -e (and Rterm -e) failed on Vista because the MSVCRT function 'tmpfile' is broken on that platform. o Making a .msi installer now works with WiX 2.0.5805.0 (the file format had been changed since 2.0.4221.0 as previously tested). o The grid package could set the clipping region outside the device region, and the windows() device now intersects the two when setting the clipping region. Once an invalid region was set, semi-transparent text and lines might have been omitted. o Some (but not all) Korean users have been having problems with Korean translations of the Rgui menus. These had not been updated for a long time, and have now been removed. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.7.1 NEW FEATURES o Rgui now accepts Unicode characters invalid in the locale when pasted in and converts them to \uxxxx sequences before passing to R. o The Save as | Postscript ... file selection box now offers *.eps (default) and *.ps file selections. o nchar() now gives the number of characters and their width as would be printed in Rgui for non-representable UTF-8 strings, not as they would be printed in Rterm (via escapes). o savePlot() now adds the file type as an extension to the filename if no dot ('.') is present in the filename. This provides the same default as in versions prior to 2.7.0, but allows the extension to be specified explicitly. (Contributed by Steve Ellison.) BUG FIXES o Sys.getenv() could read incorrectly non-ASCII values. o The vertical scrollbar on the data editor/viewer now works when scrolling beyond 65535 rows. (PR#11291) o getWinProgressBar() returned an integer result -- it now returns a double value. o basename() and dirname() could truncate their results when Unicode chars were used (usually in a CJK locale). o memory.size() no longer wraps around allocations greater than 2Gb. (PR#11596) o file.choose() in SDI mode now restores the window focus properly. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.7.0 WINDOWS VERSIONS o Versions of Windows older than 2000 are no longer supported (specifically, 95, 98, ME, NT4). Windows 2000 is minimally tested, but those tests were successful. GUI CHANGES o The folder selection dialog used by choose.dir() and File | Change dir is now re-sizeable with a status line showing the currently selected path, rather than having a separate 'Browse' button. o When Rgui is launched from a terminal, C output from ill-formed packages that write to stdout or stderr rather than use Rprintf will appear in the terminal rather than being lost. (Only on XP or later.) This can be very handy for debugging C code in packages: just write debugging messages to stdout. INTERNATIONALIZATION o If a string presented to the parser contains a \uxxxx escape invalid in the current locale, the string is recorded in UTF-8 with the encoding declared. This is likely to throw an error if it is used later in the session, but it can be printed, and used for e.g. plotting on the windows() device. So "\u03b2" gives a Greek small beta and "\u2642" a 'male sign'. Such strings will be printed as e.g. except in the Rgui console (see below). o Rgui has been re-written to work internally in Unicode. This means that copy and paste will be done in Unicode, and should now work correctly if R is being run in a different locale from other applications. There is more support for input methods, thanks to Ei-ji Nakama. o The Rgui console can display UTF-8 encoded strings (provided the font selected has the glyphs needed). o The windows() family of devices now always use Unicode fonts (except for the Symbol font), not just in multibyte locales. This means it should be possble to plot in an 8-bit locale other than the system locale (e.g. for R running in Russian with Windows set to French). Further, they can handle UTF-8-encoded strings, so if a character string in R is marked (see ?Encoding) as UTF-8, it can be plotted (for a suitable font) even if it is not a valid character in the current locale. Thus one way to plot a Greek beta (Unicode point U+03B2) is text(x, y, "\u03b2"). The postscript() and pdf() devices handle UTF-8-encoded strings provided the characters used are in both the output encoding and the PostScript font used. o Environment variables are read and set in Unicode by Sys.getenv()/Sys.setenv(). o Sys.info() uses UTF-8 machine, login and user names. o readClipboard() can read Unicode text (format = 13), and writeClipboard() can write it. o file() and pipe() connections and the functions basename(), dir(), dirname(), dir.create(), DLL.version(), file.access(), file.copy(), file.create(), file.exists(), file.info(), file.remove(), file.rename(), getwd(), load(), normalizePath(), path.expand(), save(), setwd(), shell(), shell.exec(), shortPathName(), Sys.chmod(), Sys.glob(), system() and unlink() have been converted to use Unicode filenames. Pathnames you select (by choose.files(), choose.dir() and file.choose()) are returned in UTF-8. list.files() still works with the native charsets as we do not have a Unicode regexp engine. (The code for grep uses wide chars internally but does not provide an interface.) o Collating (e.g. <) and sorting is done in UTF-8 where one of the items is in UTF-8. o If readLines() or scan() is passed an unopened connection with a non-default 'encoding' argument, it will re-encode to UTF-8 and declare the encoding on character columns. TIME ZONES o This version of R no longer makes use of Windows' flawed concept of time zones but replaces it by Arthur Olson's public-domain tz database (which is widely used, including on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD and by Java and Tcl). This means that time zones should now be referred to by their 'standard' names, and will be output correctly (e.g. not the incorrect 'GMT Daylight Time' for 'British Summer Time' used by Windows). o An attempt is made (once per session) to identify the current timezone from the Windows' Registry. If this does not work or is incorrect, set the 'TZ' environment variable appropriately: a list of known timezones is given in R_HOME/share/zoneinfo/zones.tab (some alternative names will also be recognized). (Thanks to Uwe Ligges for testing various versions on German versions of Windows: time zone names are stored in the language of the Windows install.) o Since the Windows C runtime does not think that times prior to 1970-01-01 00:01 *in Seattle* are valid, heuristics had to be used for the time zones pre-1970. Now the database is available for 1902-1969 (and nowhere had DST prior to 1902 and the time offset is assumed to be the same as in 1902) and so the results are reliable from the onset of standard time (second half of the nineteenth century) until the near future (since legislators change time zones with little notice). GRAPHICS DEVICE CHANGES o Options "graphics.record", "windowsBuffered", "xpinch" and "ypinch" have been replaced by a function windows.options() to set the defaults for the arguments of the windows() device. o The windows() device has a new argument 'title' to set the title of the window. o The windows() device no longer sizes the window to allow for scrollbars that might be needed for rescale="fixed", which means the default size really is 7 inches square and not 7.177 inches. o Saving a graphics window containing semi-transparent colours to BMP, JPEG or PNG now works. o The bmp(), jpeg() and png() devices support semi-transparent colours. See ?png for use with transparent backgrounds. Specifying 'res' to these devices now scales the text size and line width. o Drawing circles is now done with an integer diameter rather than radius and so can be more accurate for small circles. You can see this in the pairs plot and coplot examples in demo(graphics) which on a 96dpi system use diameter 5 rather than radius 2. o There is a new tiff() graphics device, and an option to save to TIFF from the graphics device menu and in savePlot(). (The only advantage of (simple) TIFF over PNG is that some journals are unable to cope with formats from as recently as 1996.) o savePlot() no longer automatically adds an extension to the filename. PACKAGE INSTALLATION o Using PKG_C[XX]FLAGS instead of PKG_CPPFLAGS for -I and -D flags is now a fatal error. o INSTALL does selection of lazyloading or not via an initial dummy installation, so large packages which cannot be installed without lazyloading and do not specify it may succeed when they did not earlier. o The new argument dyn.load(DLLpath=) was implemented to make DLL conflicts easier to manage on Windows (see ?dyn.load), and is used by package tcltk. This changes the meaning of the environment value MY_TCLTK: its value is now the path to the directory containing tcl85.dll and tk85.dll. o The GraphApp DLL is now called Rgraphapp.dll to avoid any conflicts. Packages using it (Cairo, RWinEdt) will need to be re-installed for R 2.7.0. o zlib is now packaged as Rzlib.dll and its headers are installed. Packages attempting to use the former private entry points in R.dll will need to be modified to include $(ZLIB_LIBS) in PKG_LIBS. o install.packages() now handles type="source", repos=NULL installs. OTHERS o bitmap(), dev2bitmap() and embedfonts() now look at environment variable GSC if R_GSCMD is unset. (This is the variable used by ps2pdf and similar batch files.) o loadRconsole() may now be used in Rterm and embedded R (where it affects graphics windows and pagers). Embedded R no longer reads the Rconsole file on startup. o getClipboardFormats() by default returns a human-readable character vector, but will give numeric output with new arguent 'numeric = TRUE'. o New function readRegistry() to read registry hives. o The progress bar in download.file() is now supressed by quiet=TRUE (as it has long been on Unix). o RSetReg now uses full pathnames, the same as the regular installer. o Font Consolas has been added to the console fonts listed in the GUI preferences widget. o New widget winProgressBar() (based on the progress bar used by download.file()). o The download progress bar now shows the percentage done in the title bar (and hence in the Windows task bar). o download.file() now selects mode="wb" if 'mode' is not supplied and the file extension on the url looks like a binary file. o tools::texi2dvi() detects the use of MikTeX's texi2dvi and uses its '-I path' argument to add the path to R's style files (such as Sweave.sty) to the input search path. o R CMD Rd2dvi defaults to 'yap' as the previewer (rather than xdvi.bat) -- as before this is set by the environment variable 'xdvi'. o The size of the Rgui buffer is now set in characters not bytes (the difference only matters in CJK locales), but for backwards compatibility the entry in Rconsole is still called 'bufbytes'. The default has been increased to 250,000 chars (0.5Mb). BUILDING R o Support for the ACML BLAS has been withdrawn (there is no version of ACML 4.0.0 for gcc under Windows, and none at all for gfortran). o We assume version 2.7.0 of Rtools.exe, in which gcc is version 4.2.1. o We assume Tcl/Tk version 8.5.x (included in version 2.7.0 of Rtools.exe). Earlier versions can be selected in MkRules. The distribution in Rtools (and hence in the binary installer) includes the BWidget and Tktable extensions. BUG FIXES o If a windows(rescale="fit") device was shrunk initially to fit on screen, the font size was not rescaled to take account of the initial shrink factor. o If windows(ypinch=) was specified, the 'width' argument's value was used for the height. o The Graphapp computation for keyboard accelerators for menus was not always working correctly, at least on Windows XP -- this affected e.g. Alt-M plus 'i' for 'List search path', where the second 's' was being underlined. (PR#11036) o The winDialogString() dialog now releases CPU cycles while waiting for input. (PR#11045) o R CMD now sets TEXINPUTS to .;%R_HOME%/share/texmf;%TEXINPUTS%; by exact analogy with Unix-alikes (that is, including the current directory before R's texmf directory). ************************************************** * * * 2.6 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.6.2 patched INSTALLER o The installer now uses version-specific identifiers so that multiple versions of R can be installed and uninstalled separately. (PR#10746) CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.6.2 WORKAROUNDS o We set some environment variables to work around hangs in Rgui when packages (e.g. the then current version of tseries) use Fortran WRITE calls. The Fortran output will be written to a file named 'fort.6' in the working directory. o Browsing for a directory in choose.dir() and the Rgui 'Change Dir...' menu item now works around Vista's confusion about 'desktop' by starting at 'Computer' on Vista/Server 2008. o The shortcuts created by the installer now start R in the user's personal folder (typically 'My Documents' or 'Documents'). NEW FEATUES o win.version() and Sys.info() know about recent and upcoming Windows versions, including if they are running on a 64-bit platform. o The listbox used by select.list() now responds to double-clicking an item (as if the item had been selected and then the OK button pressed). o The header iconv.h is now installed, and can be used by packages in conjunction with PKG_LIBS=-liconv . o The value of "default" for the postscript() 'paper' argument for savePlot() and the windows() graphics device menus is now interpreted as "special" (rather than "a4" or "letter"): it can still be overridden by setting ps.options(). (This changes the default output to be most suitable for inclusion in other documents rather than to produce a page for printing.) BUG FIXES o If a graphics window was opened in MDI mode while the console was zoomed, it would not be initialized properly. o The graphics window placement parameters on the GUI preferences dialog were being ignored. o The text field in a drop-down list (as used in GUI preferences for fonts) will now scroll horizontally when a user enters text that exceeds the display width. o If Rterm is invoked as 'R', the status code (as passed to q()) is now returned (rather than 0 or 1). o Double clicking on a saved workspace (or dragging and dropping it onto Rgui.exe) failed to open it if the Rprofile or Rprofile.site file changed the working directory. OTHERS o The MSVC run-time (used by MinGW) has a global variable to determine whether files default to text or binary mode. R now overrides this setting so that files are always read in text mode by default: this is relevant to embedded uses of R. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.6.1 PACKAGE INSTALLATION o Fortran code in packages is no longer compiled with -Wall, as this is not done on other platforms. OTHERS o The canvas used when plotting on a jpeg() or bmp() device with a transparent background (most often by copying from a screen device with the default transparent background) is now white and not grey. o It seems file.access() can be unreliable both ways: that is it can also report that access is barred when it is not. (Seen on network file systems.) So install.packages() to a single library no longer makes use of file.access() but checks directory creation instead: it is still possible that you can create a directory but not be allowed to create a .dll or .chm file, at least under Vista. o When R_COMPLETION is set to FALSE, TAB is no longer ignored, but advances to the next tab stop in Rterm (the pre-2.5.0 behaviour) and inserts a space in Rgui. BUG FIXES o Saving a plot to Postscript or PDF required the font database to have been initialized: this is now done if necessary. o Very long file or pathnames could cause a crash if opened in the script editor. (PR#10402) CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.6.0 GUI CHANGES o The console now handles cut and paste and mouse clicks in the input line in a more Windows standard way. It also indicates insert and overwrite mode with different cursors. FUNCTION CHANGES o embedFonts() now accepts paths in 'GS_CMD' which contain spaces. o The windows() device supports semi-transparent colours under Windows 2000 and later, for lines, fills and text. o file.info() has an additional column 'exe' saying if the file is executable and if so what subsystem would be used to execute it. o getWindowsHandle() now returns the handle as an external pointer. It no longer returns the process ID. o system() (and hence shell()) now reports as the return value only the bottom 16 bits of process error codes to protect against executables with invalid error codes (such as -1 from fc.exe, PR#9868). o pipe() in Rgui now runs the command through the shell specified by the COMSPEC environment variable, as Rterm has always done. o l10n_info() reports the codepage in current use. o dQuote() and sQuote() now use directional quotes by default under RGui. You might prefer options(useFancyQuotes=FALSE) if the console font does not have these quotes: see the rw-FAQ. INSTALLER o The components now have two levels, and the Tcl/Tk docs can be deselected independently. Only CHM help for Tcl/Tk is shipped (since Winhelp does not work on Vista). PACKAGE INSTALLATION o The undocumented use of 'OBJS' in src/Makevars.win has been removed: use 'OBJECTS' (as documented in 'Writing R Extensions') instead. o PKG_CFLAGS, PKG_CXXFLAGS, PKG_FCFLAGS and PKG_FFLAGS now precede the system equivalents, as they have long done on Unix-alikes. o FC is used rather than F95 for consistency with Unix-alikes. o A file src/Makefile will now be ignored: use src/Makefile.win. (All packages known to build on Windows which have a src/Makefile also have a src/Makefile.win.) o The src/Makevars flag SAFE_FFLAGS (documented in 'Writing R Extensions') is now available on Windows. o There are dummy targets 'before' and 'after' in MakeDll which can be overidden in src/Makevars.win. o graphapp is now in a separate DLL, so packages making direct use of it need to link against -lgraphapp. This is the value of the macro GRAPHAPP_LIB that you can include in PKG_LIBS in Makevars.win (etc). (GRAPHAPP_LIB is undefined in earlier versions, so this is backwards compatible). o If the HTML Help Workshop fails when chm help is requested, package installation will continue with a warning. o The C99 flag (-std=gnu99) is now used for compiling packages as well as R itself. o If the TMPDIR environment variable is not set, Rcmd now tries the TEMP variable before setting TMPDIR to C:/temp. BUILDING R o Cross-building does now lazy-load the base package. o The Lea malloc is now used by regex.c, src/extra/pcre and src/extra/xdr. (This is for potential performance gains.) o There is an experimental option BUILD=F2C for use when there is no Fortran compiler installed, but there is a compatible f2c installed. Set CC in the environment to point to the C compiler to be used. (Some binary builds of gcc omit the Fortran compiler, and commercial C compilers generally do not have matching Fortran compilers.) OTHERS o Some 64-bit versions of Windows (e.g. Vista 64) allocate 4GB user address space to each process that is large-address aware (as the R processes are), and on those systems the default memory limit will be the smaller of the amount of RAM and 3.5GB. o Rcmd INSTALL --docs=chm now means 'CHM only' and not 'all' as in earlier versions of R. o The afm files in library/grDevices/afm are now compressed, which reduces the installation size by ca 2Mb. o Installing a package with 'SaveImage: yes' no longer looks at the .Renviron startup files, and so takes R_LIBS from the environnment. This is consistent with lazyloading a package. o The preferred build environment is to use gcc >= 4.2.1, specified via BUILD=GCC4 in MkRules (the default). Set BUILD=GCC3 in MkRules if you have gcc 3.4.5. There is support for a gcc4 cross-compiler via the CROSS-GCC macro in MkRules. o Rcmd build now uses 'tar --force-local' so it should work with Cygwin and MSYS tar as well as that in Rtools. This replaces a workaround for Cygwin tar only. o Rcmd config is now implemented. o More Windows locale names set via LC_ALL etc work to set the message language, needed under Vista (which is picker than XP about such names, so LC_ALL=ru no longer works and LC_ALL=rus is required). o There are now warnings on startup if locale categories cannot be set (a warning for LC_CTYPE may apply to all categories). This has become much more common under Vista. o Single and double quotations are now rendered using directional quotes in text conversions of R help (as they always have been in HTML, CHM and latex versions of the help). Note that directional double quotes are missing in FixedSys on most versions of Windows, and although the files will be rendered correctly in CJK locales using the builtin pager, they may not be in external pagers. o Rcmd Rdiff now ignores the difference between smart single quotes and '. This will probably only work correctly in single-byte locales. (This is in addition to UTF-8 directional single quotes which the Unix version has for some time equated to '.) o locale category LC_CTYPE="C" is now supported: it was previously remapped to 'en' (that is US English) due to problems in the MinGW runtime which have since been resolved. BUG FIXES o Pasting into the script editor would sometimes change fonts and lose line breaks. (Reported by Bob Muenchen.) ************************************************** * * * 2.5 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.5.1 patched BUG FIXES o .Platform$GUI would report "Rgui" when no GUI was present in R(D)COM. o '=' within '-e expression' on the command line is no longer interpreted as setting an environment variable. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.5.1 GUI CHANGES o Within Rgui, completion can be turned on or off from the 'Misc' menu, and if completion is on, file name completion can be turned off (or back on again). The list of possible completions is removed once any further key is pressed. o The "Paste commands only" context menu is slightly better at recognizing and removing prompts, e.g. from example() output or debug sessions. o Using a modal widget from Rterm (e.g. select.list) is now far more likely to be forced to the front. OTHERS o file.access() has been rewritten using Win32 functions and should be more reliable, particularly on NT-based versions of Windows. (PR#7234) o The version number of the installer now includes the SVN revision number (which is handy for R-patched and R-devel daily builds). BUG FIXES o unlink() was not accepting wildcards. o Since Windows will not unlink the current working directory, we change working directories before clearing the session temporary directory. o The PDF version of the 'R Internals' manual was missing its indices. o Rcmd BATCH did not accept input file paths with spaces in 2.5.0. (PR#9652) o R_LIBS_SITE and R_LIBS_USER did not accept paths on network shares (starting \\). (Rcmd INSTALL will not work with libraries on network shares, however.) o path.expand() and other uses of '~' (e.g. filepaths) now take the value of the home directory from the environmental variable R_USER and not from the pre-2.0.0 definition of 'home'. This means that if HOME is unset, the value defaults to the personal directory and not %HOMEDRIVE%HOMEDIR. o The setting of R_TEXOPTS has been moved from MkRules to doc/manual/Makefile.win. This avoids error messages if 'latex' is not in the path. o Rcmd INSTALL now sets up lazyloading earlier if explicitly requested in the DESCRIPTION file. This is needed for packages that use 'methods' and need to load themselves to process their data. o winMenuDel() was not automatically deleting sub-menus when a user menu was deleted. (PR#9702) o Rcmd INSTALL --docs=txt etc works (for a single type, except 'chm' which is equivalent to 'all' nowadays). CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.5.0 GUI CHANGES o In MDI mode there is a new View menu when the console is in focus which allows the toolbar and statusbar to be (de)selected, with the initial settings taken from the Rconsole file as before. The default setting for the statusbar has been changed to 'no', as it is barely used by default. o There is a new menu item in Rgui to 'Stop all computations' which kills all R computations immediately, skips any on.exit conditions and returns to the command prompt. o The 'Install packages ...' menu item now only installs essential dependencies ('Depends' and 'Imports' but not 'Suggests'), using install.packages(dependencies = NA). o The 'save as' file dialogs from the 'File' menu in a graphics window now add an appropriate extension to the file name. To specify a file name without an extension, put the name in quotes, e.g. "foo". (As requested in PR#9336.) o There is support in both Rgui and Rterm for object/file name completion via the TAB key using package rcompgen. This can be disabled by setting the environment variable R_COMPLETION=FALSE when starting R (e.g. in ~/.Renviron). (Words within quotes are interpreted as file names, others as R object names. Use library(rcompgen); ?rc.options for more details, including tuning the behaviour.) FUNCTION CHANGES o Sys.getenv() has been changed to use the C-level environment and not the Windows environment block for the process, for consistency with Sys.getenv("FOO"), Sys.setenv() and Sys.unsetenv(). A few Windows-specific environment variables (such as =C:) no longer appear. o https:// URLs can be accessed by download.file() and url() if --internet2 is used (and provided the certificate is accepted as valid). o bitmap() and dev2bitmap() will now accept paths in 'GS_CMD' and 'file' which contain spaces (by converting to short path names inside the functions). o system() gains an 'ignore.stderr' argument for consistency with Unix. (This changes the order of arguments.) The defaults have been changed to 'show.output.on.console=TRUE, invisible=TRUE' which make system() in Rgui more consistent with Rterm and with other ports of R. o For consistency with Unix, system(intern=TRUE) and pipe(, "r") connections no longer capture stderr, only stdout (except on Rgui if ignore.stderr = FALSE, since Rgui has no separate stderr). INSTALLER o The Inno Setup installer now installs the desktop icon (if selected) for all users if run from an account with administrative privileges. OTHERS o This file (CHANGES) has been reformatted to be readable by the readNEWS() function. o The C-level printf function used for printing has been altered to implement a round-to-even rule. This means that output is more likely to be identical to that on Unix-alikes. o R CMD INSTALL now installs by default into the first library on the library path if R was run in the current environment. Similarly, R CMD REMOVE by default removes from that library. R CMD INSTALL does a better job of removing its temporary directory. o R CMD BATCH now prints the result of proc.time() at the end of the output, as it long has on Unix-alikes. o More of the messages from the script editor are translatable. o There is support for x86_64 cross-compilers as well as for ix86. o mingw-runtime >= 3.11 is needed to build R. (E.g., it provides isblank that was previously missing.) o src/extra/trio has been updated to 1.12. o malloc.c has been updated to version 2.8.3. This version has a slightly different allocation strategy, and is likely to work a little better close to address space limits but may give more warnings about reaching the total allocation before successfully allocating. o file.access() would give an error if asking about execute permission on Vista: the underlying C function has been changed to be incompatible with POSIX and we now work around this. o Packages are now compiled with -O3. (R itself has been since 2.3.0.) o Packages can have a 'cleanup.win' script to cleanup after configure.win etc. o The toolset described in the R Installation and Administration manual for building on Windows is now partially available in an executable installer. o The messages about being unable to update package and search index files when installing packages without sufficient permissions to update R are now suppressed (as Windows often reports inaccurately about file permissions). BUG FIXES o md5check.exe works again (it was throwing spurious differences after a compiler update). o Some links in .chm help files were not working. (PR#9586) o rcmd Rdiff was not working (used by R CMD check). o Workaround a Windows' mktime bug that affected the POSIXct to POSIXlt conversion during leap days in leap years prior to 1970 in timezones which were on DST at the time. (PR#9572) o system() could have overflowed a buffer with a very long command line that contained quotes. ************************************************** * * * 2.4 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.4.1 patched BUG FIXES o Using the AltGr key in the script editor was treated as a control key. This was fixed for the rest of Rgui in R 0.9.1, and unfixed by the contributed code implementing the script editor. (PR#9430) o Returning focus to a window (e.g. the script editor after saving) no longer changes the size or position, e.g. leaving a maximized window maximized. o When reading from pipes (which includes pipe(open="r") and system() with intern=TRUE or show.output.on.console=TRUE in Rgui) it is now possible to interrupt the command and the Rgui console will be responsive whilst it is running (and R will take up far less of the CPU). (Probably also fixes PR#7634.) o menu.ttest2() in example package 'windlgs' was broken. o CHM help is now converted with support for the \encoding{} section. o etc/Makeconf was being left out of builds of the installer. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.4.1 UNCATEGORIZED o Inno Setup >= 5.1.7 is now required to build the installer. o Reverted 2.4.0 change that required case-sensitive specification of commands to R CMD. o The Simplified Chinese menu messages were in the wrong format, causing Rgui to crash on startup. (PR#9277) o Menu messages are now available in a Spanish translation. o The pointsize of fonts in the windows() graphics device may now be set to any positive integer. o Building customized installers failed because the startup options weren't being handled properly. o If Rconsole settings were such that R could not start properly, it crashed. It now suggests starting with the --vanilla option, which now does not load Rconsole. Additionally, an option --no-Rconsole has been added for completeness and debugging. o shell.exec() now gives an error and a reason when it fails (rather than continuing silently as before). o R CMD SHLIB again uses PKG_LIBS in files Makevars[.win] (it did not in R 2.4.0). CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.4.0 UNCATEGORIZED o The language for menus and messages can be set in the 'Rconsole' file and (for future messages/sessions) from the GUI preferences. o The initial setting for console buffering can be set in the 'Rconsole' file and (for future sessions) from the GUI preferences. o The installer can set defaults for MDI/SDI display, help style, and use of the --internet2 startup option. Custom builds of R can change these defaults. The standard build now defaults to CHM help. o If CHM help is selected, but is not present (e.g. a package was cross- compiled on Unix), the help system defaults to text help. o getGraphicsEvent() now writes its prompt to the standard output stream, so it can be captured by sink() or capture.output(). o getGraphicsEvent() now leaves the standard graphics window menus in place, so those functions are available while waiting for an event. o iconv.dll has been updated to 1.11, which has some improvements for CJK languages under Windows (e.g. support for the Euro). o Rcmd and R CMD check the name of Perl scripts, so errors like 'R CMD install' are detected. o The default limit for --max-mem-size has been changed: see the rw-FAQ. o The .chm files are now given a title identifying the package. o There are new utilities 'Rcmd Sweave' and 'Rcmd Stangle' for processing of Sweave documentation. INSTALLING PACKAGES o It is now possible to use relative paths as 'lib' in install.packages(), not just absolute ones. o Installing packages (in particular saving an image and preparing for lazy-loading and lazydata) is now done in a C locale for consistency with Unix. (This will only possibly affect CJK locales, where some checks on the validity of symbols and strings might be locale-dependent.) o There is a new file etc/Makeconf that provides an approximation to the Unix version and may help with src/Makefile's. C-LEVEL CHANGES o There is now a similar embedding interface to that under Unix, using Rf_initEmbeddedR / Rf_endEmbeddedR. o The C-level *printf functions have been replaced by those from the trio library, which ensures a higher level of C99 compliance without the need for lots of Windows-specific workarounds. o Entry points which are hidden in libR.so on Unix are now also hidden in R.dll. (Just over half the entry points are hidden, which speeds up loading.) o It is possible to select (in MkRules) the type of debug symbol used, and this now defaults to 'dwarf-2' (which is more efficient than the previous default of 'stabs'). More parts of R are now built with debug symbols when DEBUG=T. o The symbols in graphapp are now remapped to start with GA_, so any code making use of graphapp will need to be recompiled. BUILDING R o mingw-runtime >= 3.10 is required to build R (a bug fix in the handling of MBCS code is required). This is enforced by a check in building Rpwd.exe. o At the time of writing mingw-runtime-3.10 was not listed on the MinGW downloads page, but it is available from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mingw/mingw-runtime-3.10.tar.gz?download BUG FIXES o The menu items for source and load/save workspace/history and drag-and-drop can now be used for paths on network shares (starting with \\). o Using lines of more than 1000 chars in an R file in batch mode could crash R. o If the input line limit (1024 bytes) was exceeded whilst pasting in, a byte was lost and the last byte input from the keyboard was repeated after the paste. o The script editor would only load 1000 bytes if the locale in use was not the system locale. (PR#9254) ************************************************** * * * 2.3 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.3.1 patched BUG FIXES o winMenuAdd() could crash when too many menus were added. (PR#8961) o The data editor could crash when too much was pasted into it. o dirname() converted paths involving network shares to forward slashes. (PR#8892) o R could crash when very low on memory. (PR#8981) o Due to a typo, R CMD Rd2dvi would not work with MiKTeX. o Objects from Fortran 9X sources no longer need to be declared to R CMD SHLIB/INSTALL via OBJS in Makevars.win. o There is a new option to make a .msi Microsoft Installer, intended for use by sysadmins doing automated installs. See the 'R Installation and Administration Manual'. (Thanks to David del Campo (Dept of Statistics, University of Oxford) for suggesting WiX and building a prototype installer.) o It was intended that saving the GUI preferences would default to the home directory, but Windows only accepted paths with \ separators at that point, ignoring others with no error message. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.3.1 UNCATEGORIZED o In the GUI preferences editor, the font size can be set to values not in the drop down list. (The number of choices in the list has been increased.) Font names not in the drop-down font list can be chosen. o The MinGW C function wcrtomb was only working for Latin-1 characters, and it had been replaced. This affected the specification of 'pch' as a character, and some little-used aspects of plotmath. o The installer generated a link in the Program menu to a no-longer existent help page. o Opening a device via windows(resize="fixed") would sometimes fail with a message about 'outer margins too large'. (PR#8857) o Sys.setlocale() interprets LC_CTYPE=C as a request for CP1252, as the startup code long has. (This is necessary to avoid various crashes in the MinGW runtime code.) CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.3.0 UNCATEGORIZED o There is an error handler for access violations and illegal instructions, which issues a traceback and error message, then returns to the top level. This is switched off after 10 uses in a session. Note that such errors can be the result of damage to the code or objects in memory, so it is advisable to save your work and restart R unless you know exactly what happened. o There is a new function choose.dir() to choose a folder (as used for 'Change dir...' on the File menu in Rgui.) o New function shortPathName() to convert names to DOS-style paths (8+3 names and no spaces). o Added workaround to Windows graphics devices (windows(), win.metafile(), etc.) to allow callers to choose not to restore the focus to the console. The interface to this will likely change in a future release. o For compatibility with Unix, the following environment variables are checked for a writable directory for the R session temporary directory: TMPDIR TMP TEMP R_USER (the last will always succeed). The changes are that TMPDIR is checked first and that the values are checked to be a directory. o sprintf() now tries to ensure the output is C99-compliant, with e.g. 1.23e+08 not 1.23e+008 as given by MSVCRT.dll. o Rterm now responds to Ctrl-C during input (Ctrl-Break always worked). This means ^C is no longer echoed. o The minimum value for --max-mem-size is now 32M (rather than 16M). o file.info() now supports files bigger than 2Gb (the size was reported incorrectly before, since Windows' stat call only supports smaller files). o The installer executable now has the file version information set appropriately. o The DLL version number is now 2.xy.svn_revision. o There is now aggressive protection of the setting of the FPU control word: it is reset to 64-bit mantissa and rounding mode before evaluating every expression. This should prevent the implicit loading of DLLs changing to 53-bit mantissa, but has a small performance penalty. o The file open dialogs now list *.ssc and *.S files in addition to *.q files as "S files". o readClipboard() and writeClipboard() now support formats other than text. A new function getClipboardFormats() reports on available formats. o The Rgui console now supports '\r' in output as a non-destructive return to the left margin in the same way as Rterm (it was previously ignored). Note that copy/cut of overtyped output will not necessarily pick up the visible layer of text. o The "Edit|GUI preferences..." dialog now allows Rconsole files to be loaded as well as saved. A new function loadRconsole() has also been added. INTERNATIONALIZATION o There is no longer a separate 'East Asian' version of R.dll. (Also, msvcp60.dll is no longer used as libmingwex now supplies suitable functions.) o There is now MBCS support for the line editor in Rterm.exe. (Contributed by Haruki Koyanagi.) o On NT-based versions of Windows, Unicode characters are used to draw on the console, pager, editor and windows() family of devices in multi-byte locales. (This allows the user to select a locale other than the one Windows is running in, and with suitable fonts see the intended characters. Menus and dialogs should also work in the selected locale. A Windows quirk means that window titles (which includes the legends for the buttons used in the Preferences dialog box) use a font in the system locale. o Added a few mappings from Windows locale names (e.g. "chinese", "chs", "cht", "ptb", "spanish", "esp", "esm", "esn") to language names. There is still scope for confusion: LC_ALL=es is Estonian, and LANGUAGE=es is Spanish. o Spanish (as used in Spain) has been added to the list of installation languages. INSTALLING PACKAGES o R CMD INSTALL will now clean up after interruption (by Ctrl-C, at least where supported by the shell). o R CMD INSTALL --docs now has more options. o Links to package 'methods' are now fixed up, and R CMD INSTALL no longer reports as missing links to 'datasets' and 'grDevices' which would be fixed up. o There is now support for compiling Fortran 90/95 code in packages: see 'Writing R Extensions'. o Packages can now supply export files pkgname/src/pkgname-win.def: package 'stats' does so. o The restriction on the number of dots in a package name (which stemmed from an undocumented restriction in ld.exe) has been worked around. C-LEVEL CHANGES o This version of R expects a complete double-complex BLAS to be available, and so customized (e.g. ATLAS and ACML) versions of Rblas.dll need to be rebuilt. (The pre-compiled ones available on CRAN have been updated.) o The ACML optimized BLAS can be used for LAPACK: see the 'R Installation and Administration Manual'. o Since the Goto BLAS is no longer available for Windows, support for it has been withdrawn. o The assembler exponentiation code has been updated to that from glibc 2.3.6. o The import libraries libR.a, libRblas.a, libRlapack.a and libproxy.a are no longer used, as we now link directly to the corresponding DLL (except that a local version of libRblas.a is needed to build R.dll, since R.dll and Rblas.dll are mutually dependent). o Import libraries are now made by default without -k (--kill-at). This might be relevant for contributed software using R's macros. o The default optimization level for code in R (but not packages) has been changed from -O2 to -O3, since space taken by compiled code is no longer much of an issue. This will result is a small performance increase. o When making DLLs, the objects are no longer wrapped in an archive en route (this was needed to avoid line-length limits on an earlier shell). o When making standalone Rmath, the static library is now libRmath.a and the import library is called libRmath.dll.a. BUG FIXES o iconv() was not always getting the current charset ("") right, especially if the locale was set in a running R session. o gzfile() now always ensures that the underlying file is opened in binary mode (this is only an issue on Windows). This solves some problems with reading compressed data files via gzfile(). o winMenuAdd() now has no limits on the number of menus or items, and names are now limited to 500 (not 50) bytes. o Several fixes to Rproxy have been submitted by Thomas Baier, so it handles more types of objects. o Outputting \b in Rgui deleted the last byte and not the last character. ************************************************** * * * 2.2 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.2.1 patched BUG FIXES o Opening any window (pager/editor/windows() device) was resetting the LC_CTYPE in the locale to the system default. o formatC() sometimes gave spurious leading spaces on Windows (PR#8337). o Workaround in unlink() for a Windows-run-time problem with deleting directories with leading spaces in the name. o tempdir() and tempfile() use all backslashes again (2.2.1 did not). o When a graphics window was double-buffered, it would update too frequently while waiting for input, overloading some remote display utilities. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.2.1 UNCATEGORIZED o Using the latest binutils allows us to distribute Rgui.exe and Rterm.exe as large-address-aware (see the rw-FAQ Q2.9). o The maximum C stack size for Rgui.exe and Rterm.exe has been increased to 10Mb (from 2Mb); this is comparable with the default on Linux systems and may allow some larger programs to run without crashes. o Overwrite mode in the console now works for MBCS charsets. (Patch contributed by Haruki Koyanagi.) o Input from the Rgui console was changing the letter 255 (ΓΏ in Latin-2) in the character set to letter 1. o R CMD REMOVE in 2.2.0 removed the package(s) but failed to remake the indices. o The windows() family of devices did not find the right character width in MBCS locales for non-ASCII characters. (Pointed out by Ei-ji Nakama.) o The installer was missing doc/html/index.html. o Windows was sometimes incorrectly labelling times on BST as on GMT, e.g. "1972-07-01 01:00:00 GMT Standard Time". o Closing the script editor could leave Rgui in an unstable state. (PR#8288) o Support has been added for the ACML optimized BLAS: see the 'R Installation and Administration Manual'. o winMenuAdd() had a limit of 16 additional menus but only allocated 10: it now has the limit of 16 as intended. o Clicking on the left part of the MDI radiobutton in the preferences dialog failed. o A different algorithm is used to find the R session temporary directory, one that is more likely to succeed. o For compatibility with Unix, tempfile() names have a random hex suffix (and not a decimal one), and there are many more values to choose from. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.2.0 UNCATEGORIZED o The installer will be called R-2.2.0-win32.exe and by default install into (the local equivalent of) C:/Program Files/R/R-2.2.0. The 'rw2010' notation has been dropped. o file:// URLs are now interpreted by download.file(), download.packages() and url() in the same way as Mozilla-based browsers. That is, the expected form is file:///d:/path/to/file with *three* slashes. o library.dynam() temporarily adds the /libs dir to the path so that dependent DLLs can be put there and found with no further action. o The (D)COM support has been updated, and header files and an import library (src/gnuwin32/librproxy.a) are now installed. See the rcom package for usage. o There are now Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Traditional) and Russian translations of the Rgui menus. o win.graph(), x11() and X11() now behave in the same way as windows() in respect of the xpinch, ypinch, graphics.record, gamma and windowsBuffered options. o savePlot() now allows extensions '.emf' and '.eps'. o The script editor menu no longer has an option to exit R (as the pager and graphics menus do not). o Installation is now available in Finnish. o install.packages() now detect members of a bundle which are in use and so skips the bundle (as it does for packages). o MiKTeX is now recognised and the command-line set suitably for it. o If the user chooses to register R during installation, a registry entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\R-core\R\{version}\InstallPath will be added. Users require administrative privileges to create this key: for others, the same key will be put under the HKEY_CURRENT_USER root. o The sample R_HOME/etc/Rprofile file has been renamed to Rprofile.site (the documented name for such a file for some years). o mingw-runtime-3.8 is now required to build R (as it contains expm1). ************************************************** * * * 2.1 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.1.1 patched BUG FIXES o The progress bar was being left behind when a download was aborted. (PR#7964). In addition, it now retains its position from one download to the next, rather than always moving back to the center of the screen. o Added workaround in Sys.timezone() for Windows' confusion over the GMT timezone. o Windows was sometimes leaving behind temporary files associated with anonymous file() connections - we now try to clean up after it. o The default type of file for saving a script was not being set by the contributed C code for the script editor, so it reverted to the type of the last file dialog (PR#8018). o formatC() with an exponential format sometimes did not line the fields up correctly. o The 'Open Script' button shown from the pager toolbar in MDI mode was set up incorrectly and liable to crash R. (PR#8060) o seek(origin = "end") was repositioning to the wrong location. (PR#7896) CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.1.1 UNCATEGORIZED o The installer allows a choice of languages. Note that uninstallation will happen in the language chosen for installation. o A menu item has been added for RSiteSearch(). o localeToCharset() was failing on some unknown (to the maintainers) locales such as LC_CTYPE=Chinese_People's Republic of China.936 and that affected example(). o Translation of the filters in file load/save dialog spaces was being handled incorrectly by gettext, and is now not attempted. o Attempting to plot repeatedly to the same metafile sometimes crashed R. (PR#7821: it is unclear why Windows does not allow this.) o Using the mouse scroll wheel in the data editor sometimes caused it to scroll out of range and crash or display garbage. o The support for mitred lines encountered a Windows problem with a dramatic slowdown if more than 1000 or so segments were plotted in a polyline. We now plot in bunches of 1000, which is less accurate but works around the Windows problem. o There is a workaround for the Windows-specific problems that Sys.putenv(TZ="GMT") was not recognized by the OS and that Windows believes that there is such a thing as "GMT Standard Time". o Inno Setup >= 5.1.2 is now required to build the installer. o For some operations on windows() and related devices the first text drawn could be improperly sized. (PR#7860). o R would crash when ESC was pressed during locator(). (PR#7873). o seek() was not always reporting the correct position on files > 2Gb. (PR#7879) CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.1.0 UNCATEGORIZED o There is no longer a miniR distribution. o Support for seek() on > 2Gb files has been added. o You will be asked to select a CRAN mirror when downloading/updating packages unless options("repos") has already been set in your session, e.g. in your .Rprofile file or from the 'Select CRAN mirror' menu item. (In batch use, not having set a mirror will lead to an error.) BDR's supplementary collection is now included in the default options("repos"): if you want to include it explicitly set something like options(repos=c(some_cran_mirror, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin")) o There is a new item on the Packages menu to set repositories, e.g. CRAN, Bioconductor, Omegahat. You can modify the list (and its defaults): see the rw-FAQ Q2.9. This supersedes the menu items for Bioconductor. o The new (in R 2.0.0) graphics pars "lend", "ljoin" and "lmitre" are now implemented for the Windows devices. o `Writing R Extensions' now documents how to interface a front-end directly to R.dll, and there are some new convenience functions for such front-ends. o R CMD / Rcmd now set HOME if unset, e.g. for use in Rcmd check. o The installer now offers the option (by default unchecked) of a `quick launch icon" for R. o par(ask = TRUE) now takes input from the graphics window, rather than from the console. o Rcmd REMOVE works more similarly to Unix, setting the default library from R_LIBS if the latter is set. o install.packages() can install source packages as well as binary ones. o shQuote() now defaults to type="cmd" on Windows. o R can now be built with Unicode support on Win9x and WinME. See src/gnuwin32/MkRules: this is currently experimental and not needed for standard builds. o R can now be built with support for multibyte and variable-width character sets, e.g. for Japanese. See README.rw????. The standard installer includes both single-byte and multi-byte builds. o select.list() now looks up the current font size and chooses its window size based on that. It allows multiple preselections if multiple=TRUE. o The instructions for compiling packages from source and for compiling R itself have been moved to the R Installation and Administration manual; the PDF copy of that manual has been added to the Rgui Help | Manuals menu list. o The way the command history works has been changed to be more like readline. All the commands used in a session are kept, but only the last R_HISTSIZE (default 512) lines are saved. The environment variable R_HISTSIZE can be changed during the session (by Sys.putenv) as the current value is used. o The font list in the Preferences screen has been expanded to include fonts used in `East Asian' terminals. o A bug with font changing in Preferences introduced with the script editor in R 2.0.0 had been fixed. This should fix PR#7271,7277,7749. o Line widths on windows() devices (including win.print()) are now interpreted as multiples of 1/96" (or the pixel size if it is larger, as it may be for a screen device). This follows the postscript() and pdf() drivers. It is now possible to set lwd < 1 provided this corresponds to lines of at least one pixel width. ************************************************** * * * 2.0 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.0.1 patched BUG FIXES o We work around reported bugs in Windows XP as to which characters are printable by attempting to print all non-control characters when using print(). o There are now facilities (documented in file src/gnuwin32/INSTALL) to add packages when building the R installer, and to rebuild a customized installer from the existing binary distribution. o Tcl/Tk could crash Rgui during shutdown by trying to print an error message after the console had been shut down. Such messages are now redirected to message boxes. o bug.report() failed to open the internal editor. We have changed it to use file.edit() to edit the report, with the consequence that there is no longer a "wait" parameter. CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.0.1 GUI CHANGES o There is a new menu item to set a CRAN mirror. BUG FIXES o jpeg(), png() and bmp() were not handling background colours properly. o It seems that on some systems (but not the maintainers') Mozilla 1.7.3 requires \ not / in filepaths, so help(topic, htmlhelp=TRUE) now uses \. (PR#7269) Hopefully no system requires / not \ ! o Changes to help() meant that help(topic, chmhelp=TRUE) was no longer working if `topic' was an alias. (PR#7269) o Recent changes caused (D)COM to sometimes go into infinite loops. o Any change in the GUI preferences via the dialog box changed font (even if to the same font as before). This is causing problems in MDI mode with toolbars (PR#7277), where real font changes are not working properly. o Control keys in Tcl/Tk windows were not handled properly; Tcl/Tk interacted badly with Rgui in other ways as well. o R CMD SHLIB gave spurious error messages for inputs like all.f and all.c. o `make recommended' was not consulting the setting of WINHELP or HELP, so failed if HHW was not installed. o We have increased the chances that installing a source package from an explicit path with spaces in will work, so e.g. R CMD INSTALL "/Documents and Settings/myname/Source Files/mypkg" will probably work -- it is still not recommended. You can also get away with backslashes here, but forward slashes are safer. o select.list(preselect=) was not working. (PR#7328) o The graphics recording mechanism windows(record = TRUE) could cause memory corruption. ********************************************************* * * * News of 1.x.y and 2.0.0 is in file `CHANGES1' * * News of 1.0.0 and earlier is in file `CHANGES0' * * These files are available in the source * * distribution. * * * ********************************************************* %%% Local Variables: %%% mode: text %%% End: