The R Project SVN R

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

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


R 2.3.0
=======

There is a new function choose.dir() to choose a folder (as used for
'Change dir...' on the File menu in RGui.)

New function shortPathNames() to convert names to DOS-style paths (8+3
names and no spaces).

There is now MBCS support for the line editor in Rterm.exe.
(Contributed by Haruki Koyanagi.)

Import libraries are now made without -k (--kill-at).  This is not
relevant for base R (R.dll, Rblas.dll and Rlapack.dll only use cdecl
entry points) but might be for contributed software using R's macros.

The import libraries libR.a, libRblas.a and libproxy.a are now
installed in R_HOME/lib (rather than R_HOME/src/gnuwin32).

R CMD INSTALL will now clean up after interruption (by ctrl-C, at
least where supported by the shell).



R 2.2.0 patched
===============

Using the latest binutils allows us to distribute RGui.exe and Rterm.exe
as large-address-aware (see the rw-FAQ Q2.9).

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.

Overwrite mode in the console now works for MBCS charsets.  (Patch
contributed by Haruki Koyanagi.)

Input from the RGui console was changing the letter 255 (ÿ in Latin-2)
in the character set to letter 1.

R CMD REMOVE in 2.2.0 removed the package(s) but failed to remake the
indices.

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.)

The installer was missing doc/html/index.html.

Windows was sometimes incorrectly labelling times on BST as on GMT,
e.g. "1972-07-01 01:00:00 GMT Standard Time".



R 2.2.0
=======

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.

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.

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.

There are now Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Traditional) and 
Russian translations of the RGui menus.

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.

savePlot() now allows extensions '.emf' and '.eps'.

The script editor menu no longer has an option to exit R (as the pager
and graphics menus do not).

Installation is now available in Finnish.

install.packages() now detect members of a bundle which are in use
and so skips the bundle (as it does for packages).

MiKTeX is now recognised and the command-line set suitably for it.

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.

The sample R_HOME/etc/Rprofile file has been renamed to Rprofile.site
(the documented name for such a file for some years).

mingw-runtime-3.8 is now required to build R (as it contains expm1).



R 2.1.1 patched
===============

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.

Added workaround in Sys.timezone() for Windows' confusion over the GMT
timezone.

Windows was sometimes leaving behind temporary files associated with
anonymous file() connections - we now try to clean up after it.

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).

formatC() with an exponential format sometimes did not line the fields
up correctly.

The 'Open Script' button shown from the pager toolbar in MDI mode was
set up incorrectly and liable to crash R.  (PR#8060)

seek(origin = "end") was repositioning to the wrong location. (PR#7896)



R 2.1.1
=======

The installer allows a choice of languages.  Note that uninstallation
will happen in the language chosen for installation.

A menu item has been added for RSiteSearch().

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().

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 operations on windows() and related devices the first text
drawn could be improperly sized. (PR#7860).

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

seek() was not always reporting the correct position on files > 2Gb. (PR#7879)



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.