R Portable Files

CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.15.3:

  NEW FEATURES:

    o lgamma(x) for very small x (in the denormalized range) is no
      longer Inf with a warning.

    o image() now sorts an unsorted breaks vector, with a warning.

    o The internal methods for tar() and untar() do a slightly more
      general job for 'ustar'-style handling of paths of more than 100
      bytes.

    o Packages compiler and parallel have been added to the reference
      index (refman.pdf).

    o untar(tar = "internal") has some support for pax headers as
      produced by e.g. gnutar --posix (which seems prevalent on
      OpenSUSE 12.2) or bsdtar --format pax, including long path and
      link names.

    o sQuote() and dQuote() now handle 0-length inputs.  (Suggestion of
      Ben Bolker.)

    o summaryRprof() returns zero-row data frames rather than throw an
      error if no events are recorded, for consistency.

    o The included version of PCRE has been updated to 8.32.

    o The tcltk namespace can now be re-loaded after unloading.

      The Tcl/Tk event loop is inhibited in a forked child from package
      parallel (as in e.g. mclapply()).

    o parallel::makeCluster() recognizes the value random for the
      environment variable R_PARALLEL_PORT: this chooses a random value
      for the port and reduces the chance of conflicts when multiple
      users start a cluster at the same time.

  UTILITIES:

    o The default for TAR on Windows for R CMD build has been changed
      to be internal if no tar command is on the path.

      This enables most packages to be built 'out of the box' without
      Rtools: the main exceptions are those which need to be installed
      to re-build vignettes and need Rtools for installation (usually
      because they contain compiled code).

  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:

    o On a 64-bit Windows platform with enough RAM, R_alloc can now
      allocate up to just under 32GB like other 64-bit platforms.

  DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:

    o Use of col2rgb(0) is deprecated (see the help page for its
      limitations).

    o The deprecated intensities component returned by hist() is no
      longer recognized by the plot() method and will be removed in R
      3.0.0.

    o real(), as.real() and is.real() are now formally deprecated and
      give a warning.

    o This is formal notice that the non-API EISPACK entry points in R
      will be removed shortly.

  INSTALLATION:

    o The configure tests for Objective C and Objective C++ now work on
      Mac OS 10.8 with Xcode 4.5.2 (PR#15107).

    o The cairo-based versions of X11() now work with current versions
      of cairographics (e.g. 1.12.10).  (PR#15168)

      A workaround for earlier versions of R is to use X11.options(type
      = "nbcairo").

    o Configuration and R CMD javareconf now come up with a smaller set
      of library paths for Java on Oracle-format JDK (including
      OpenJDK).  This helps avoid conflicts between libraries (such as
      libjpeg) supplied in the JDK and system libraries.  This can
      always be overridden if needed: see the 'R Installation and
      Administration' manual.

  BUG FIXES:

    o beta(a, b) could overflow to infinity in its calculations when
      one of a and b was less than one.  (PR#15075)

    o lbeta(a, b) no longer gives NaN if a or b is very small (in the
      denormalized range).

    o bquote() is now able to substitute default arguments in
      single-argument functions.  (PR#15077)

    o browseEnv(html = FALSE) would segfault if called from R (not
      R.app) on a CRAN-style Mac OS X build of R.

    o [[<- for lists (generic vectors) needed to increment NAMED count
      when RHS is used more than once. (PR#15098)

    o On Windows, warnings about opening a file or pipe with a
      non-ASCII description were sometimes output in UTF-8 rather than
      in the current locale's character set.

    o The call() function did not duplicate its arguments.  (PR#15115)

    o TukeyHSD() could give NA results with some na.action methods such
      as na.exclude().  (Hinted at on R-help by John Fox.)

    o The deprecated svd(X, LINPACK = TRUE) could alter X in R
      2.15.[12].  (Reported by Bill Dunlap.)

    o Under Windows, file.link() and file.symlink() used the link name
      twice, so would always fail. (Reported by Rui Barradas/Oliver
      Soong).

    o summaryRprof(memory = "both") mixed up the units of Vcells and
      Ncells: it now works in bytes.  (PR#15138)

    o tools::Rd2HTML() would sometimes delete text. (PR#15134)

    o plot() failed for "table" objects containing just one entry.
      (PR#15118)

    o embedFonts() needed to quote some filepaths.  (PR#15149)

    o parallel::mccollect() handled NULL returns incorrectly (removing
      the element rather than setting it to NULL).

    o The full reference index (fullrefman.pdf) was missing packages
      compiler and parallel.

    o The report for optim(method = "L-BFGS-B", control = list(trace =
      1)) reported the last completed and not the current iteration,
      unlike other methods and trace levels.  (PR#15103)

    o qt(1e-12, 1.2) no longer gives NaN.

    o dt(1e160, 1.2, log=TRUE) no longer gives -Inf.

    o On Windows the untar() function now quotes the directory name
      when using an external tar utility, so R CMD check will handle
      pathnames containing spaces.

    o The version for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 is now
      displayed by win.version().  (Reported by Gabor Grothendieck.)

    o The custom Windows installer target myR in the installer Makefile
      did not work in 2.15.2.  (Reported by Erich Neuwirth.)

    o aperm(matrix(1:6, 2, dimnames=list(A={}, B={})), "A") no longer
      segfaults.

    o Expressions involving user defined operators were not always
      deparsed faithfully. (PR#15179)

    o The enc2utf8() function converted NA_character_ to "NA" in
      non-UTF-8 locales. (PR#15201)

    o The exclude argument to xtabs() was ignored for "factor"
      arguments.

    o On Windows, work around an event-timing problem when the RGui
      console was closed from the 'X' control and the closure
      cancelled. (This would on some 64-bit systems crash R, typically
      those with a slow GPU relative to the CPU.)

    o On unix Rscript will pass the r_arch setting it was compiled with
      on to the R process so that the architecture of Rscript and that
      of R will match unless overridden.