The R Project SVN R

        Windows-specific changes to R
        =============================

See the file NEWS for changes that affect all versions of R.


R 2.2.0
=======

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.



R 2.1.0 patched
===============

The installer allows a choice of languages.

A menu item has been added for RSiteSearch().

localeToCharset() was failing on some unknown (to the maintainers)
locales such as

    LC_TYPE=Chinese_People's Republic of China.936

and that affected example().

Translation of the filters in file load/save dialog spaces was being
handled incorrectly by gettext, and is now not attempted.

Attempting to plot repeatedly to the same metafile sometimes crashed
R.  (PR#7821: it is unclear why Windows does not allow this.)

Using the mouse scroll wheel in the data editor sometimes caused
it to scroll out of range and crash or display garbage.

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.

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".

Inno Setup >= 5.1.2 is now required to build the installer.

For some devices the first text drawn could be improperly sized 
(PR#7860).

R would crash when ESC was pressed during locator() (PR#7873).



R 2.1.0
=======

There is no longer a miniR distribution.

Support for seek() on > 2Gb files has been added.

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"))

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.

The new (in R 2.0.0) graphics pars "lend", "ljoin" and "lmitre" are
now implemented for the Windows devices.

`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.

R CMD / Rcmd now set HOME if unset, e.g. for use in Rcmd check.

The installer now offers the option (by default unchecked) of a `quick
launch icon" for R.

par(ask = TRUE) now takes input from the graphics window, rather than
from the console.

Rcmd REMOVE works more similarly to Unix, setting the default library
from R_LIBS if the latter is set.

install.packages() can install source packages as well as binary ones.

shQuote() now defaults to type="cmd" on Windows.

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.

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.

select.list() now looks up the current font size and chooses its
window size based on that.  It allows multiple preselections if
multiple=TRUE.

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.

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.

The font list in the Preferences screen has been expanded to include fonts
used in `East Asian' terminals.

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.

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.



R 2.0.1 patched
===============

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().

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.

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.

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.



R 2.0.1
=======

There is a new menu item to set a CRAN mirror.

Bug fixes
---------

jpeg(), png() and bmp() were not handling background colours properly.

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 \ !

Changes to help() meant that help(topic, chmhelp=TRUE) was no longer
working if `topic' was an alias.  (PR#7269)

Recent changes caused (D)COM to sometimes go into infinite loops.

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.

Control keys in Tcl/Tk windows were not handled properly; Tcl/Tk
interacted badly with Rgui in other ways as well.

R CMD SHLIB gave spurious error messages for inputs like all.f and all.c.

`make recommended' was not consulting the setting of WINHELP or HELP,
so failed if HHW was not installed.

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.

select.list(preselect=) was not working. (PR#7328)

The graphics recording mechanism windows(record = TRUE) could cause memory 
corruption.


    -------------------------------------------------------------------

    For changes prior to the release of R 2.0.0 on 4 Oct 2004
    see the files CHANGES0 and CHANGES1 in the source distribution.