R Portable Files

CHANGES IN R 3.4.2:

  NEW FEATURES:

    * Setting the LC_ALL category in Sys.setlocale() invalidates any
      cached locale-specific day/month names and the AM/PM indicator
      for strptime() (as setting LC_TIME has since R 3.1.0).

    * The version of LAPACK included in the sources has been updated to
      3.7.1, a bug-fix release.

    * The default for tools::write_PACKAGES(rds_compress=) has been
      changed to "xz" to match the compression used by CRAN.

    * c() and unlist() are now more efficient in constructing the
      names(.) of their return value, thanks to a proposal by Suharto
      Anggono.  (PR#17284)

  UTILITIES:

    * R CMD check checks for and R CMD build corrects CRLF line endings
      in shell scripts configure and cleanup (even on Windows).

  INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:

    * The order of selection of OpenMP flags has been changed: Oracle
      Developer Studio 12.5 accepts -fopenmp and -xopenmp but only the
      latter enables OpenMP so it is now tried first.

  BUG FIXES:

    * within(List, rm(x1, x2)) works correctly again, including when
      List[["x2"]] is NULL.

    * regexec(pattern, text, *) now applies as.character(.) to its
      first two arguments, as documented.

    * write.table() and related functions, writeLines(), and perhaps
      other functions writing text to connections did not signal errors
      when the writes failed, e.g. due to a disk being full.  Errors
      will now be signalled if detected during the write, warnings if
      detected when the connection is closed.  (PR#17243)

    * rt() assumed the ncp parameter was a scalar.  (PR#17306)

    * menu(choices) with more than 10 choices which easily fit into one
      getOption("width")-line no longer erroneously repeats choices.
      (PR#17312)

    * length()<- on a pairlist succeeds.  (<URL:
      https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2017-July/074680.html>)

    * Language objects such as quote(("\n")) or R functions are
      correctly printed again, where R 3.4.1 accidentally duplicated
      the backslashes.

    * Construction of names() for very large objects in c() and
      unlist() now works, thanks to Suharto Anggono's patch proposals
      in PR#17292.

    * Resource leaks (and similar) reported by Steve Grubb fixed.
      (PR#17314, PR#17316, PR#17317, PR#17318, PR#17319, PR#17320)

    * model.matrix(~1, mf) now gets the row names from mf also when
      they differ from 1:nrow(mf), fixing PR#14992 thanks to the
      suggestion by Sebastian Meyer.

    * sigma(fm) now takes the correct denominator degrees of freedom
      for a fitted model with NA coefficients.  (PR#17313)

    * hist(x, "FD") no longer "dies" with a somewhat cryptic error
      message when x has extreme outliers or IQR() zero: nclass.FD(x)
      tries harder to find a robust bin width h in the latter case, and
      hist.default(*, breaks) now checks and corrects a too large
      breaks number.  (PR#17274)

    * callNextMethod() works for ... methods.

    * qr.coef(qd, y) now has correct names also when qd is a complex QR
      or stems from qr(*, LAPACK=TRUE).

    * Setting options(device = *) to an invalid function no longer
      segfaults when plotting is initiated.  (PR#15883)

    * encodeString(<very large string>) no longer segfaults.
      (PR#15885)

    * It is again possible to use configure --enable-maintainer-mode
      without having installed notangle (it was required in R
      3.4.[01]).

    * S4 method dispatch on ... calls the method by name instead of
      .Method (for consistency with default dispatch), and only
      attempts to pass non-missing arguments from the generic.

    * readRDS(textConnection(.)) works again.  (PR#17325)

    * (1:n)[-n] no longer segfaults for n <- 2.2e9 (on a platform with
      enough RAM).

    * x <- 1:2; tapply(x, list(x, x), function(x) "")[1,2] now
      correctly returns NA.  (PR#17333)

    * Running of finalizers after explicit GC request moved from the R
      interface do_gc to the C interface R_gc.  This helps with
      reclaiming inaccessible connections.

    * help.search(topic) and ??topic matching topics in vignettes with
      multiple file name extensions (e.g., *.md.rsp but not *.Rmd)
      failed with an error when using options(help_type = "html").

    * The X11 device no longer uses the Xlib backing store (PR#16497).

    * array(character(), 1) now gives (a 1D array with) NA as has been
      documented for a long time as in the other cases of zero-length
      array initialization and also compatibly with matrix(character(),
      *).  As mentioned there, this also fixes PR#17333.

    * splineDesign(.., derivs = 4) no longer segfaults.

    * fisher.test(*, hybrid=TRUE) now (again) will use the hybrid
      method when Cochran's conditions are met, fixing PR#16654.