Dear Emacs, please make this -*-Text-*- mode! ************************************************** * * * 2.0 SERIES NEWS * * * ************************************************** CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.0.1 NEW FEATURES o Platform equivalence in library() is tested by a new function testPlatformEquivalence() which ignores the 'vendor' field and can be customized by cognescenti. o The assignment form of split() allows recycling of vectors within the value list. In particular, things like split(x, g) <- lapply(split(x, g), mean) now work DOCUMENTATION o Manual `Writing R Extensions' has new sections on writing portable packages and on writing new front-ends for R -- the latter will be more comprehensive in R 2.1.0 which has new public header files. DEPRECATED & DEFUNCT o The aqua module in MacOS X is deprecated. o Capabilities "bzip2", "GNOME, "libz" and "PCRE" are deprecated. o The GNOME GUI on Unix-alikes is deprecated as part of R; it will be available in another form as from R 2.1.0. o The undocumented use of UseMethod() with no argument is now formally deprecated. INSTALLATION CHANGES o Building on Alpha OSF/1 no longer forces the C flag -std1, which appears to be no longer needed. (PR#7257) o The compiler flag -mieee-fp is no longer used on i386 Linux (these days it is only passed to the linker and was only invoked for compilation steps). o -D__NO_MATH_INLINES is only used on older ix86 glibc-based systems which need it (tested at configure time). This leads to small improvements in speed and accuracy on modern systems. o If makeinfo >= 4.5 is not available, warnings are given that some of the HTML manuals will be missing, and the index page given by help.start() will link to CRAN versions of those manuals. o Files aclocal.m4 and acinclude.m4 used in maintainer builds are not longer included in the distribution. C-LEVEL FACILITIES o It was not clear in 'Writing R Extensions' that some of the entry points in the 'Utilities' section were not declared in (they were in ). Now all the entry points in that section are declared in , included by . BUG FIXES o The grid.grab() function in package grid would throw an error if there were no viewports pushed (now returns NULL). o model.frame.default() takes row names from the response variable if that has suitable names and there is no 'data' argument. (This follows S but was not previously implemented in R.) o write.table() was not respecting the 'dec' argument for complex numbers. o write.table() printed a mixture of numeric and complex numbers as all complex. (PR#7260) o R CMD INSTALL failed with versioned installs on packages which save images (only). o dlogis() gave NaN not 0 for large negative arguments. o Importing from another namespace was broken for versioned installs, incorrectly reporting something like "package 'imported_from' does not have a name space". o The GNOME interface under Linux/Unix was broken. (PR#7276) o For the jpeg/png devices under Linux/Unix, under certain rare circumstances clipping needed to be cleared before starting a new page. (PR#7270, which has been the case since the devices were introduced in 1.1.0.) o First lattice plot (first grid.newpage() call) did not start a new page IF there had been a previous traditional graphics plot (on the same device). o Using install.packages() to install the same package to more than one library gave an incorrect warning message. (If there were two or more such packages it might give an error.) o .packages(all.available=TRUE) returned packages with an invalid version field in their DESCRIPTION whereas .find.packages() and packageDescription() did not. Now all do not. o packageDescription() now correctly reports that a package does not exist, rather than that its DESCRIPTION file is 'missing or broken'. o 'make dist' from builddir != sourcedir was copying not linking recommended packages to *.tgz. o Slots in prototype objects can inherit from locally defined classes (which were not being found correctly before). o Several fixes to the behavior of as() when there are either coerce= or replace= methods supplied in a call to setIs(). Related fixes to setIs() to handle correctly previous methods, if there were any. o splinefun(1[0], 1[0])(1) doesn't segfault anymore (PR#7290). spline() and splinefun() now also work with missing values by omiting them. o ecdf() was failing on inputs containing NAs. (Part of PR#7292) o tools:::.install_package_description was splitting the Built: field across lines on platforms with very long names. o capabilities() was wrong for the Aqua GUI on MacOS X. o Using Rprof() with a non-writable 'file' argument is now a non-fatal error and does not abort R. o binom.test() did not deparse its arguments early enough such that the reported data were ugly if x was a table. o Systems based on glibc, including those using R's substitute for strptime, were handling strptime("2001", "%Y") incorrectly, in some cases crashing. R's substitute code has been corrected (but problems may remain if glibc is used). See the ?strptime for what should happen (which is system-specific). o untrace() after trace() failed if package 'methods' was attached. (PR#7301) o summary.stepfun() was reporting for n > 6 summaries of the knots and levels as the actual values. Both print() and summary() methods called the constant values "step heights", although they were not the heights of the steps. o is.na/is.nan() were giving spurious warnings if applied to a raw vector. o is.atomic() gave incorrect result (false) for a raw vector. o rank() and order() accepted raw and list inputs, but did not give a sensible answer (always 1:n). Similarly, partial sorts of a raw vector were accepted but did nothing. o require() without a version argument tried for an unversioned load of a package even though a versioned install was already loaded. This often led to a message that a required package was being loaded when it was not actually being loaded. o str() made use of attributes() instead of slot(), and hence didn't properly print NULL slots. o contrib.url() now handles URLs ending in '/' correctly. o str() removed any class from externalptr objects. o logLik() and hence AIC() failed or gave incorrect answers on "lm" fits with na.action = na.exclude (and perhaps other na.actions's except na.omit and na.fail). o pmax() and pmin() sometimes used NAs in internal subassignments, and sometimes these failed. o Subassigning an expression, e.g. expr[2] <- 1, could leave an invalid object and so cause a segfault. (PR#7326) o download/install.packages() would misbehave if there was more than one version of a package in a repository. o sort(partial=) silently ignored some other arguments: using 'decreasing' or 'index.return' or supplying a factor are now errors. o The ave() function had trouble if the grouping contained unused levels. o read.fwf() got confused by skip > 0 and could infinite loop under some circumstances. (PR#7350) o upgrade(x, ask = FALSE) was broken for a "packageStatus" object. o Class "raw" had been omitted from the list of basic classes in the "methods" package and so could not be used in S4 classes. o Function getGroupMembers(), part of the definition of S4 classes, had been promised for release 2.0, but slipped through. ********************************************************* * * * News of 1.x.y and 2.0.0 is in file `ONEWS' * * News of 1.0.0 and earlier is in file `OONEWS' * * * *********************************************************