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**************************************************
* Windows-specific changes to R *
* See the file NEWS for changes that *
* affect all versions of R. *
**************************************************
**************************************************
* *
* 2.9 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.9.2 patched
BUG FIXES
o If a nonstandard font were specified in Rconsole, the GUI
preferences dialog would crash R.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.9.2
NEW FEATURES
o The --internet2 command line option sets a flag internally;
that flag is now visible and controllable from R using the
setInternet2() function.
o file.access() proved unreliable on some network-mounted file
systems (probably a Samba issue), so it has been replaced in R
CMD INSTALL by a directory creation test. (Reported by Simon
Urbanek and Ruth Ripley.)
o Sys.glob() attempts to handle UNC paths starting with \\ (which
according to the globbing rules is escaped \), thanks to a patch
from Tony Plate.
BUG FIXES
o Topics marked as "internal" in help files were not visible
from CHM help.
o The bmp(), jpeg(), png() and tiff() devices were not scaling
'pointsize' correctly with the resolution, for grid-based
plots (e.g. those from lattice) only.
These devices were scaling 'width' by res=1 if units="mm".
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.9.1
BUG FIXES
o memory.limit(size) gave a spurious error message.
o file.choose() and the save console dialog did not set the
file filters properly.
o Rcmd INSTALL --build in 2.9.0 did not make _bundles_ in the
format install.packages() expected.
o Calling setWinProgressBar() on a closed bar gives an error
message, rather than crashing R. (PR#13709)
o sprintf("%a") works better in some cases thanks to a patch to
trio from Ei-ji Nakama.
o Scrolling controls (e.g. from View() and edit()) did not handle
large line counts well.
o capabilities("tiff") was incorrectly being reported as FALSE
(due to an error in the Windows-specific config.h file).
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.9.0
NEW FEATURES
o memory.size() and memory.limit() now return rounded values.
o The Rgui preferences dialog now allows more flexible colour
settings, and shows a sample of what will be displayed.
o The file selection items on Rgui's File menu now work in
Unicode and so allow filenames not in the current encoding to
be selected.
o file.choose() and choose.files() now work with Unicode file
names, so are able to select filenames not in the current
encoding. (Note that we do not expect to handle directory
paths not in the current encoding and they will not be
retained as the current search directory.)
o The script editor is now able to open files with names which are
not in the current encoding: however the title displayed will
replace invalid bytes by '?'.
o file() and pipe() now open non-ASCII pathnames as Unicode:
this helps if R is running in a character set different from that
used by Windows.
o help(topic, offline=TRUE) now creates a file called <topic>.tex,
rather than Rdoc.tex.
o The trio library has been updated to version 1.13.
o New function msgWindow() to allow a windows() device or the
Rgui console to be minimized, maximize or restored and (not
the console) hidden, and to have recording turned on or off.
o Rcmd SHLIB now uses the same code as on a Unix-alike, and so
has some extra options.
o iconv() is now done by a version of Yukihiro Nakadaira's
win_iconv rather than by libiconv. This version is based on
Windows' codepages and is not quite as comprehensive as
libiconv: it is however much smaller and easier to maintain.
The implementation here is 100% compatible: you can drop in
libiconv's iconv.dll as a replacement if you need it, from
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/Riconv.dll.
To avoid name conflicts with Gtk+, it has been renamed to
Riconv.dll.
o Completions in Rgui when selected from a list are now coloured
as user input rather than R output (wish of PR#13562).
o Omegahat is no longer offered as a repository for binary
packages, as the latest versions it had were for R 2.7.x.
INSTALLATION
o The installer now checks for Windows 2000 or later.
o There is a new component, 'Test files', which if selected will
install the package-specific tests and some generic tests.
Functions testInstalledPackages() and testInstalledBasic() in
package 'tools'can be used to test these.
o Support for cross-building has been withdrawn.
UTILITIES
o RSetReg's name for the version-specific Registry entry in
development versions of R now matches that of the R installer.
PACKAGE INSTALLATION
o The way packages are installed has been overhauled to be much
closer to the Unix version: for example Rcmd SHLIB is used to
build DLLs (unless there is a src/Makefile.win). This means
that various private variables and files that some packages
used are no longer available, notably DPKG (the documented
variable was and is R_PACKAGE_DIR) and MkRules (use
etc/Makeconf).
o Rcmd INSTALL now supports the same option names as the
Unix-alike version: use 'Rcmd INSTALL --help' for details.
In particular, --docs is replaced by --no-docs, --no-text,
--no-html, --no-latex, --no-example and --no-chm.
o Since iconv.dll has been renamed, packages wanting to link
against it need to use -lRiconv (or, hetter, use the entry
points in R_exts/Riconv.h).
CUSTOMIZATION
o The name of the producer can be changed in installer/Makefile
and front-ends/RSetReg.c.
**************************************************
* *
* 2.8 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.8.1 patched
BUG FIXES
o getwd() could segfault (PR#13424).
o dir() does a better job when dir is of rhe form "d:", the
currrent directory is not the root on that drive, and either
'full' or 'recursive' is true.
o Sys.setenv() since R 2.7.0 was limited to 1023 characters for
the name+value, and silently truncated the value otherwise.
It should now work up to the Windows limit (which is
version-dependent).
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.8.1
NEW FEATURES
o R_HOME/bin/helpPRINT.bat now contains an example of use with
MiKTeX to produce a PDF version of the help file.
o Rcmd INSTALL has a new option --pkglock to allow a per-package
lock directory (useful for parallel installs).
BUG FIXES
o The windows() device now works around the total clipping of
semi-transparent rectangles and circles that extend outside
the device region.
o The script editor did not respect user preferences for the
background colour.
o normalizePath() no longer returns a garbage string when the
input is bad; it now signals an error. (PR#13199)
o File share/sh/dcf.sh was not distributed with the binary
build. (PR#13200)
o dir.create() did not print the path correctly in warning messages.
o The C-level function consolecmd had been broken in non-Latin-1
single-byte locales in R 2.8.0 by changes intended to support
the Japanese IME. This affected some menu items in Rgui
(e.g. to source R files with non-Latin-1 names) and submitting
commands from the script editor, but only in rarer encodings
such as Central European, Greek and Cyrillic. (PR#13195,
probably also PR#13120)
o The attempt to make the 'Load' button in the GUI preferences
start in the home directory failed if the latter was specified
with forward slashes, and reset the current search directory
for other file open dialogs (e.g. for opening a script).
o The installer would sometimes write the current version
information to the registry even if that option was not
checked.
o Rcmd INSTALL --with-package-versions now works in a few more
cases (of lazy loading and lazy data), but still many of the
options are not supported (e.g. --use-zip). Versioned
installs are now deprecated, so regard them as unsupported on
Windows (and a warning is given). (PR#13284)
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.8.0
NEW FEATURES
o Rterm --ess sets stdout to be unbuffered, as it would be for
output to a terminal.
o windows() gains a new argument 'clickToConfirm', default TRUE,
which controls if new-frame confirmation is done via clicking
(or ENTER) on the window (the recent default) or via a
question in the console (the default for other interactive
devices). The non-default behaviour may be useful when R is
driven indirectly (e.g. via ESS) and for some Rterm users.
o If the HOME environment variable is not set, Rgui and Rterm
will set it to match R_USER (as Rcmd does).
o The graphics devices bmp, jpeg, png, tiff and win.metafile
perform tilde-expansion on their 'filename' argument. Also
savePlot.
UTILITIES
o Rcmd sets many more enviroment variables, including all those
set by R CMD under a Unix-alike which make sense on Windows.
o Rcmd now follows a similar strategy to R when finding a valid
TMPDIR setting: it tries TMPDIR, TMP, TEMP and R_USER looking
for a directory -- the last will succeed as it does for R.
o Rcmd has a new utility open.exe to open files via their file
associations.
o Rcmd Rd2dvi now opens .dvi and .pdf files via their file
associations (if set -- MiKTeX sets 'yap' for .dvi).
o Rcmd check now checks the latex of any package vignettes if
texi2dvi (presumably from MiKTeX) is found on the path.
o Package checking (including 'make check') is no longer done in a
C locale but in the current locale (although LANGUAGE=en is
used).
o Rproxy.dll is no longer part of the R distribution: it has
been replaced by CRAN package rscproxy.
BUG FIXES
o winDialog() and winDialogString() check that they are being
used in an interactive session.
o The Korean translation of the Rgui menus has been corrected
and restored. (Thanks to June Kim and Seung-ho Kang.)
o The list of hives in the readRegistry() defaults contained
a typo; error messages were incomplete. (PR#12937)
o The custom install options were not saved/restored when the
installer was run with /SAVEINF or /LOADINF respectively.
o savePlot() expected 'filename' in the native encoding.
**************************************************
* *
* 2.7 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.7.2 patched
BUG FIXES
o iconv() was incorrectly identifying R running in an Eastern
European locale as using ISO-8859-2 (aka Latin-2) rather than
CP1250: they differ in the positions of some characters,
notably s and z with caron. This was seen in tcltk output
from Rcmdr in 2.7.x, but might have occurred elsewhere (and
earlier).
This also affected localeToCharset() which incorrectly
returned "ISO8859-2".
The same issue seems to have caused problems with starting
R 2.7.x in the Chinese (Hong Kong S.A.R.) locale on some
systems (e.g. PR#12658): the problems were with locale names
which contained periods.
o dir.create(recursive = TRUE) was not working on //server/share
paths.
o The clip region was sometimes wrong when printing from the
menu on a windows() graphics device (in 2.7.2 only).
o The windows() device would sometimes ignore font family
requests (PR#12931).
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.7.2
NEW FEATURES
o Rgui has a new menu item 'Html search page' on the Help menu,
which goes directly to the HTML search form. This is needed
by users of Firefox 3, which generates incorrect links in
search results when the page is accessed via the 'Html help'
menu item (or via help.start()).
BUG FIXES
o Saving a graph in TIFF format could crash R (PR#11804).
o Rterm in interactive use did not implement R_FlushConsole() fully.
o getGraphicsEvent() did not return onMouseMove events while a
mouse button was depressed.
o The confirmation of a new frame for a windows() graphics
device works harder to give the device focus, including
bringing it to the top.
o glob (used by Sys.glob() and unlink()) was not working correctly
on some filename patterns including non-ASCII characters.
Part of the problem was specific to 2.7.[01], part has existed
since 2.5.0.
o Sys.glob() returned a UTF-8 result in 2.7.[01] but failed to
mark its encoding.
o User menus were not properly removed when a graph window was
closed.
o Rscript -e (and Rterm -e) failed on Vista because the MSVCRT
function 'tmpfile' is broken on that platform.
o Making a .msi installer now works with WiX 2.0.5805.0 (the file
format had been changed since 2.0.4221.0 as previously tested).
o The grid package could set the clipping region outside the
device region, and the windows() device now intersects the two
when setting the clipping region. Once an invalid region was
set, semi-transparent text and lines might have been omitted.
o Some (but not all) Korean users have been having problems with
Korean translations of the Rgui menus. These had not been
updated for a long time, and have now been removed.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.7.1
NEW FEATURES
o Rgui now accepts Unicode characters invalid in the locale when
pasted in and converts them to \uxxxx sequences before passing
to R.
o The Save as | Postscript ... file selection box now offers
*.eps (default) and *.ps file selections.
o nchar() now gives the number of characters and their width as
would be printed in Rgui for non-representable UTF-8 strings,
not as they would be printed in Rterm (via <U+xxxx> escapes).
o savePlot() now adds the file type as an extension to the
filename if no dot ('.') is present in the filename. This
provides the same default as in versions prior to 2.7.0, but
allows the extension to be specified explicitly. (Contributed
by Steve Ellison.)
BUG FIXES
o Sys.getenv() could read incorrectly non-ASCII values.
o The vertical scrollbar on the data editor/viewer now works
when scrolling beyond 65535 rows. (PR#11291)
o getWinProgressBar() returned an integer result -- it now
returns a double value.
o basename() and dirname() could truncate their results when
Unicode chars were used (usually in a CJK locale).
o memory.size() no longer wraps around allocations greater than
2Gb. (PR#11596)
o file.choose() in SDI mode now restores the window focus
properly.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.7.0
WINDOWS VERSIONS
o Versions of Windows older than 2000 are no longer supported
(specifically, 95, 98, ME, NT4). Windows 2000 is minimally
tested, but those tests were successful.
GUI CHANGES
o The folder selection dialog used by choose.dir() and
File | Change dir is now re-sizeable with a status line showing
the currently selected path, rather than having a separate
'Browse' button.
o When Rgui is launched from a terminal, C output from ill-formed
packages that write to stdout or stderr rather than use
Rprintf will appear in the terminal rather than being lost.
(Only on XP or later.) This can be very handy for debugging C
code in packages: just write debugging messages to stdout.
INTERNATIONALIZATION
o If a string presented to the parser contains a \uxxxx escape
invalid in the current locale, the string is recorded in UTF-8
with the encoding declared. This is likely to throw an error
if it is used later in the session, but it can be printed, and
used for e.g. plotting on the windows() device. So "\u03b2"
gives a Greek small beta and "\u2642" a 'male sign'. Such
strings will be printed as e.g. <U+2642> except in the Rgui
console (see below).
o Rgui has been re-written to work internally in Unicode. This
means that copy and paste will be done in Unicode, and should
now work correctly if R is being run in a different locale
from other applications. There is more support for input
methods, thanks to Ei-ji Nakama.
o The Rgui console can display UTF-8 encoded strings (provided
the font selected has the glyphs needed).
o The windows() family of devices now always use Unicode fonts
(except for the Symbol font), not just in multibyte locales.
This means it should be possble to plot in an 8-bit locale
other than the system locale (e.g. for R running in Russian
with Windows set to French).
Further, they can handle UTF-8-encoded strings, so if a
character string in R is marked (see ?Encoding) as UTF-8, it
can be plotted (for a suitable font) even if it is not a valid
character in the current locale. Thus one way to plot a Greek
beta (Unicode point U+03B2) is text(x, y, "\u03b2").
The postscript() and pdf() devices handle UTF-8-encoded
strings provided the characters used are in both the output
encoding and the PostScript font used.
o Environment variables are read and set in Unicode by
Sys.getenv()/Sys.setenv().
o Sys.info() uses UTF-8 machine, login and user names.
o readClipboard() can read Unicode text (format = 13), and
writeClipboard() can write it.
o file() and pipe() connections and the functions basename(),
dir(), dirname(), dir.create(), DLL.version(), file.access(),
file.copy(), file.create(), file.exists(), file.info(),
file.remove(), file.rename(), getwd(), load(),
normalizePath(), path.expand(), save(), setwd(), shell(),
shell.exec(), shortPathName(), Sys.chmod(), Sys.glob(),
system() and unlink() have been converted to use Unicode
filenames.
Pathnames you select (by choose.files(), choose.dir() and
file.choose()) are returned in UTF-8.
list.files() still works with the native charsets as we do not
have a Unicode regexp engine. (The code for grep uses wide
chars internally but does not provide an interface.)
o Collating (e.g. <) and sorting is done in UTF-8 where one of
the items is in UTF-8.
o If readLines() or scan() is passed an unopened connection with
a non-default 'encoding' argument, it will re-encode to UTF-8
and declare the encoding on character columns.
TIME ZONES
o This version of R no longer makes use of Windows' flawed concept
of time zones but replaces it by Arthur Olson's public-domain
tz database (which is widely used, including on Linux, Mac OS
X, Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD and by Java and Tcl). This means
that time zones should now be referred to by their 'standard'
names, and will be output correctly (e.g. not the incorrect
'GMT Daylight Time' for 'British Summer Time' used by
Windows).
o An attempt is made (once per session) to identify the current
timezone from the Windows' Registry. If this does not work or
is incorrect, set the 'TZ' environment variable appropriately:
a list of known timezones is given in
R_HOME/share/zoneinfo/zones.tab (some alternative names will
also be recognized). (Thanks to Uwe Ligges for testing
various versions on German versions of Windows: time zone
names are stored in the language of the Windows install.)
o Since the Windows C runtime does not think that times prior to
1970-01-01 00:01 *in Seattle* are valid, heuristics had to be
used for the time zones pre-1970. Now the database is
available for 1902-1969 (and nowhere had DST prior to 1902 and
the time offset is assumed to be the same as in 1902) and so
the results are reliable from the onset of standard time
(second half of the nineteenth century) until the near future
(since legislators change time zones with little notice).
GRAPHICS DEVICE CHANGES
o Options "graphics.record", "windowsBuffered", "xpinch" and
"ypinch" have been replaced by a function windows.options() to
set the defaults for the arguments of the windows() device.
o The windows() device has a new argument 'title' to set the
title of the window.
o The windows() device no longer sizes the window to allow for
scrollbars that might be needed for rescale="fixed", which
means the default size really is 7 inches square and not 7.177
inches.
o Saving a graphics window containing semi-transparent colours
to BMP, JPEG or PNG now works.
o The bmp(), jpeg() and png() devices support semi-transparent
colours. See ?png for use with transparent backgrounds.
Specifying 'res' to these devices now scales the text size and
line width.
o Drawing circles is now done with an integer diameter rather
than radius and so can be more accurate for small circles.
You can see this in the pairs plot and coplot examples in
demo(graphics) which on a 96dpi system use diameter 5 rather
than radius 2.
o There is a new tiff() graphics device, and an option to save to
TIFF from the graphics device menu and in savePlot(). (The
only advantage of (simple) TIFF over PNG is that some journals
are unable to cope with formats from as recently as 1996.)
o savePlot() no longer automatically adds an extension to the filename.
PACKAGE INSTALLATION
o Using PKG_C[XX]FLAGS instead of PKG_CPPFLAGS for -I and -D
flags is now a fatal error.
o INSTALL does selection of lazyloading or not via an initial
dummy installation, so large packages which cannot be
installed without lazyloading and do not specify it may
succeed when they did not earlier.
o The new argument dyn.load(DLLpath=) was implemented to make
DLL conflicts easier to manage on Windows (see ?dyn.load), and
is used by package tcltk. This changes the meaning of the
environment value MY_TCLTK: its value is now the path to the
directory containing tcl85.dll and tk85.dll.
o The GraphApp DLL is now called Rgraphapp.dll to avoid any
conflicts. Packages using it (Cairo, RWinEdt) will need to be
re-installed for R 2.7.0.
o zlib is now packaged as Rzlib.dll and its headers are
installed. Packages attempting to use the former private
entry points in R.dll will need to be modified to include
$(ZLIB_LIBS) in PKG_LIBS.
o install.packages() now handles type="source", repos=NULL
installs.
OTHERS
o bitmap(), dev2bitmap() and embedfonts() now look at environment
variable GSC if R_GSCMD is unset. (This is the variable used
by ps2pdf and similar batch files.)
o loadRconsole() may now be used in Rterm and embedded R
(where it affects graphics windows and pagers). Embedded R
no longer reads the Rconsole file on startup.
o getClipboardFormats() by default returns a human-readable
character vector, but will give numeric output with new
arguent 'numeric = TRUE'.
o New function readRegistry() to read registry hives.
o The progress bar in download.file() is now supressed by
quiet=TRUE (as it has long been on Unix).
o RSetReg now uses full pathnames, the same as the regular
installer.
o Font Consolas has been added to the console fonts listed in the
GUI preferences widget.
o New widget winProgressBar() (based on the progress bar used by
download.file()).
o The download progress bar now shows the percentage done in the
title bar (and hence in the Windows task bar).
o download.file() now selects mode="wb" if 'mode' is not
supplied and the file extension on the url looks like a binary file.
o tools::texi2dvi() detects the use of MikTeX's texi2dvi and
uses its '-I path' argument to add the path to R's style files
(such as Sweave.sty) to the input search path.
o R CMD Rd2dvi defaults to 'yap' as the previewer (rather than
xdvi.bat) -- as before this is set by the environment variable
'xdvi'.
o The size of the Rgui buffer is now set in characters not bytes
(the difference only matters in CJK locales), but for
backwards compatibility the entry in Rconsole is still called
'bufbytes'. The default has been increased to 250,000 chars
(0.5Mb).
BUILDING R
o Support for the ACML BLAS has been withdrawn (there is no
version of ACML 4.0.0 for gcc under Windows, and none at all
for gfortran).
o We assume version 2.7.0 of Rtools.exe, in which gcc is
version 4.2.1.
o We assume Tcl/Tk version 8.5.x (included in version 2.7.0 of
Rtools.exe). Earlier versions can be selected in MkRules.
The distribution in Rtools (and hence in the binary installer)
includes the BWidget and Tktable extensions.
BUG FIXES
o If a windows(rescale="fit") device was shrunk initially to fit
on screen, the font size was not rescaled to take account of
the initial shrink factor.
o If windows(ypinch=) was specified, the 'width' argument's value
was used for the height.
o The Graphapp computation for keyboard accelerators for menus was
not always working correctly, at least on Windows XP -- this
affected e.g. Alt-M plus 'i' for 'List search path', where the
second 's' was being underlined. (PR#11036)
o The winDialogString() dialog now releases CPU cycles while
waiting for input. (PR#11045)
o R CMD now sets TEXINPUTS to .;%R_HOME%/share/texmf;%TEXINPUTS%;
by exact analogy with Unix-alikes (that is, including the
current directory before R's texmf directory).
**************************************************
* *
* 2.6 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.6.2 patched
INSTALLER
o The installer now uses version-specific identifiers so that
multiple versions of R can be installed and uninstalled
separately. (PR#10746)
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.6.2
WORKAROUNDS
o We set some environment variables to work around hangs in Rgui
when packages (e.g. the then current version of tseries) use
Fortran WRITE calls. The Fortran output will be written to a
file named 'fort.6' in the working directory.
o Browsing for a directory in choose.dir() and the Rgui
'Change Dir...' menu item now works around Vista's confusion
about 'desktop' by starting at 'Computer' on Vista/Server 2008.
o The shortcuts created by the installer now start R in the user's
personal folder (typically 'My Documents' or 'Documents').
NEW FEATUES
o win.version() and Sys.info() know about recent and upcoming
Windows versions, including if they are running on a 64-bit
platform.
o The listbox used by select.list() now responds to
double-clicking an item (as if the item had been selected and
then the OK button pressed).
o The header iconv.h is now installed, and can be used by
packages in conjunction with PKG_LIBS=-liconv .
o The value of "default" for the postscript() 'paper' argument for
savePlot() and the windows() graphics device menus is now
interpreted as "special" (rather than "a4" or "letter"): it
can still be overridden by setting ps.options(). (This changes
the default output to be most suitable for inclusion in other
documents rather than to produce a page for printing.)
BUG FIXES
o If a graphics window was opened in MDI mode while the console
was zoomed, it would not be initialized properly.
o The graphics window placement parameters on the GUI preferences
dialog were being ignored.
o The text field in a drop-down list (as used in GUI preferences
for fonts) will now scroll horizontally when a user enters
text that exceeds the display width.
o If Rterm is invoked as 'R', the status code (as passed to q())
is now returned (rather than 0 or 1).
o Double clicking on a saved workspace (or dragging and dropping it
onto Rgui.exe) failed to open it if the Rprofile or Rprofile.site file
changed the working directory.
OTHERS
o The MSVC run-time (used by MinGW) has a global variable to
determine whether files default to text or binary mode. R now
overrides this setting so that files are always read in text
mode by default: this is relevant to embedded uses of R.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.6.1
PACKAGE INSTALLATION
o Fortran code in packages is no longer compiled with -Wall, as
this is not done on other platforms.
OTHERS
o The canvas used when plotting on a jpeg() or bmp() device with
a transparent background (most often by copying from a screen
device with the default transparent background) is now white
and not grey.
o It seems file.access() can be unreliable both ways: that is it
can also report that access is barred when it is not.
(Seen on network file systems.) So install.packages() to a
single library no longer makes use of file.access() but checks
directory creation instead: it is still possible that you can
create a directory but not be allowed to create a .dll or .chm
file, at least under Vista.
o When R_COMPLETION is set to FALSE, TAB is no longer ignored,
but advances to the next tab stop in Rterm (the pre-2.5.0
behaviour) and inserts a space in Rgui.
BUG FIXES
o Saving a plot to Postscript or PDF required the font database
to have been initialized: this is now done if necessary.
o Very long file or pathnames could cause a crash if opened in
the script editor. (PR#10402)
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.6.0
GUI CHANGES
o The console now handles cut and paste and mouse clicks in the
input line in a more Windows standard way. It also indicates
insert and overwrite mode with different cursors.
FUNCTION CHANGES
o embedFonts() now accepts paths in 'GS_CMD' which contain spaces.
o The windows() device supports semi-transparent colours under
Windows 2000 and later, for lines, fills and text.
o file.info() has an additional column 'exe' saying if the file
is executable and if so what subsystem would be used to
execute it.
o getWindowsHandle() now returns the handle as an external pointer.
It no longer returns the process ID.
o system() (and hence shell()) now reports as the return value
only the bottom 16 bits of process error codes to protect
against executables with invalid error codes (such as -1 from
fc.exe, PR#9868).
o pipe() in Rgui now runs the command through the shell specified
by the COMSPEC environment variable, as Rterm has always done.
o l10n_info() reports the codepage in current use.
o dQuote() and sQuote() now use directional quotes by default
under RGui. You might prefer options(useFancyQuotes=FALSE)
if the console font does not have these quotes: see the
rw-FAQ.
INSTALLER
o The components now have two levels, and the Tcl/Tk docs can be
deselected independently. Only CHM help for Tcl/Tk is shipped
(since Winhelp does not work on Vista).
PACKAGE INSTALLATION
o The undocumented use of 'OBJS' in src/Makevars.win has been
removed: use 'OBJECTS' (as documented in 'Writing R
Extensions') instead.
o PKG_CFLAGS, PKG_CXXFLAGS, PKG_FCFLAGS and PKG_FFLAGS now
precede the system equivalents, as they have long done on
Unix-alikes.
o FC is used rather than F95 for consistency with Unix-alikes.
o A file src/Makefile will now be ignored: use src/Makefile.win.
(All packages known to build on Windows which have a
src/Makefile also have a src/Makefile.win.)
o The src/Makevars flag SAFE_FFLAGS (documented in 'Writing R
Extensions') is now available on Windows.
o There are dummy targets 'before' and 'after' in MakeDll which
can be overidden in src/Makevars.win.
o graphapp is now in a separate DLL, so packages making direct use
of it need to link against -lgraphapp. This is the value of
the macro GRAPHAPP_LIB that you can include in PKG_LIBS in
Makevars.win (etc). (GRAPHAPP_LIB is undefined in earlier
versions, so this is backwards compatible).
o If the HTML Help Workshop fails when chm help is requested,
package installation will continue with a warning.
o The C99 flag (-std=gnu99) is now used for compiling packages
as well as R itself.
o If the TMPDIR environment variable is not set, Rcmd now tries
the TEMP variable before setting TMPDIR to C:/temp.
BUILDING R
o Cross-building does now lazy-load the base package.
o The Lea malloc is now used by regex.c, src/extra/pcre and
src/extra/xdr. (This is for potential performance gains.)
o There is an experimental option BUILD=F2C for use when there is
no Fortran compiler installed, but there is a compatible f2c
installed. Set CC in the environment to point to the C
compiler to be used. (Some binary builds of gcc omit the
Fortran compiler, and commercial C compilers generally do not
have matching Fortran compilers.)
OTHERS
o Some 64-bit versions of Windows (e.g. Vista 64) allocate 4GB
user address space to each process that is large-address aware
(as the R processes are), and on those systems the default
memory limit will be the smaller of the amount of RAM and
3.5GB.
o Rcmd INSTALL --docs=chm now means 'CHM only' and not 'all' as
in earlier versions of R.
o The afm files in library/grDevices/afm are now compressed,
which reduces the installation size by ca 2Mb.
o Installing a package with 'SaveImage: yes' no longer looks at
the .Renviron startup files, and so takes R_LIBS from the
environnment. This is consistent with lazyloading a package.
o The preferred build environment is to use gcc >= 4.2.1,
specified via BUILD=GCC4 in MkRules (the default). Set
BUILD=GCC3 in MkRules if you have gcc 3.4.5. There is support
for a gcc4 cross-compiler via the CROSS-GCC macro in MkRules.
o Rcmd build now uses 'tar --force-local' so it should work with
Cygwin and MSYS tar as well as that in Rtools. This replaces
a workaround for Cygwin tar only.
o Rcmd config is now implemented.
o More Windows locale names set via LC_ALL etc work to set the
message language, needed under Vista (which is picker than XP
about such names, so LC_ALL=ru no longer works and LC_ALL=rus
is required).
o There are now warnings on startup if locale categories cannot
be set (a warning for LC_CTYPE may apply to all categories).
This has become much more common under Vista.
o Single and double quotations are now rendered using directional
quotes in text conversions of R help (as they always have been
in HTML, CHM and latex versions of the help). Note that
directional double quotes are missing in FixedSys on most
versions of Windows, and although the files will be rendered
correctly in CJK locales using the builtin pager, they may not
be in external pagers.
o Rcmd Rdiff now ignores the difference between smart single quotes
and '. This will probably only work correctly in single-byte
locales. (This is in addition to UTF-8 directional single
quotes which the Unix version has for some time equated to '.)
o locale category LC_CTYPE="C" is now supported: it was previously
remapped to 'en' (that is US English) due to problems in the
MinGW runtime which have since been resolved.
BUG FIXES
o Pasting into the script editor would sometimes change fonts and
lose line breaks. (Reported by Bob Muenchen.)
**************************************************
* *
* 2.5 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.5.1 patched
BUG FIXES
o .Platform$GUI would report "Rgui" when no GUI was present in
R(D)COM.
o '=' within '-e expression' on the command line is no longer
interpreted as setting an environment variable.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.5.1
GUI CHANGES
o Within Rgui, completion can be turned on or off from the 'Misc'
menu, and if completion is on, file name completion can be
turned off (or back on again).
The list of possible completions is removed once any further
key is pressed.
o The "Paste commands only" context menu is slightly better at
recognizing and removing prompts, e.g. from example() output
or debug sessions.
o Using a modal widget from Rterm (e.g. select.list) is now far
more likely to be forced to the front.
OTHERS
o file.access() has been rewritten using Win32 functions and
should be more reliable, particularly on NT-based versions of
Windows. (PR#7234)
o The version number of the installer now includes the SVN
revision number (which is handy for R-patched and R-devel
daily builds).
BUG FIXES
o unlink() was not accepting wildcards.
o Since Windows will not unlink the current working directory,
we change working directories before clearing the session
temporary directory.
o The PDF version of the 'R Internals' manual was missing its
indices.
o Rcmd BATCH did not accept input file paths with spaces in
2.5.0. (PR#9652)
o R_LIBS_SITE and R_LIBS_USER did not accept paths on network
shares (starting \\). (Rcmd INSTALL will not work with
libraries on network shares, however.)
o path.expand() and other uses of '~' (e.g. filepaths) now take
the value of the home directory from the environmental
variable R_USER and not from the pre-2.0.0 definition of
'home'. This means that if HOME is unset, the value defaults
to the personal directory and not %HOMEDRIVE%HOMEDIR.
o The setting of R_TEXOPTS has been moved from MkRules to
doc/manual/Makefile.win. This avoids error messages if 'latex'
is not in the path.
o Rcmd INSTALL now sets up lazyloading earlier if explicitly
requested in the DESCRIPTION file. This is needed for
packages that use 'methods' and need to load themselves to
process their data.
o winMenuDel() was not automatically deleting sub-menus when a
user menu was deleted. (PR#9702)
o Rcmd INSTALL --docs=txt etc works (for a single type, except
'chm' which is equivalent to 'all' nowadays).
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.5.0
GUI CHANGES
o In MDI mode there is a new View menu when the console is in
focus which allows the toolbar and statusbar to be
(de)selected, with the initial settings taken from the
Rconsole file as before. The default setting for the
statusbar has been changed to 'no', as it is barely used by
default.
o There is a new menu item in Rgui to 'Stop all computations'
which kills all R computations immediately, skips any on.exit
conditions and returns to the command prompt.
o The 'Install packages ...' menu item now only installs essential
dependencies ('Depends' and 'Imports' but not 'Suggests'),
using install.packages(dependencies = NA).
o The 'save as' file dialogs from the 'File' menu in a graphics
window now add an appropriate extension to the file name. To
specify a file name without an extension, put the name in
quotes, e.g. "foo". (As requested in PR#9336.)
o There is support in both Rgui and Rterm for object/file name
completion via the TAB key using package rcompgen. This can
be disabled by setting the environment variable
R_COMPLETION=FALSE when starting R (e.g. in ~/.Renviron).
(Words within quotes are interpreted as file names, others as
R object names. Use library(rcompgen); ?rc.options for more
details, including tuning the behaviour.)
FUNCTION CHANGES
o Sys.getenv() has been changed to use the C-level environment and
not the Windows environment block for the process, for
consistency with Sys.getenv("FOO"), Sys.setenv() and
Sys.unsetenv(). A few Windows-specific environment variables
(such as =C:) no longer appear.
o https:// URLs can be accessed by download.file() and url() if
--internet2 is used (and provided the certificate is accepted as
valid).
o bitmap() and dev2bitmap() will now accept paths in 'GS_CMD' and
'file' which contain spaces (by converting to short path names
inside the functions).
o system() gains an 'ignore.stderr' argument for consistency with
Unix. (This changes the order of arguments.) The defaults
have been changed to 'show.output.on.console=TRUE,
invisible=TRUE' which make system() in Rgui more consistent
with Rterm and with other ports of R.
o For consistency with Unix, system(intern=TRUE) and pipe(, "r")
connections no longer capture stderr, only stdout (except on
Rgui if ignore.stderr = FALSE, since Rgui has no separate
stderr).
INSTALLER
o The Inno Setup installer now installs the desktop icon (if
selected) for all users if run from an account with
administrative privileges.
OTHERS
o This file (CHANGES) has been reformatted to be readable by the
readNEWS() function.
o The C-level printf function used for printing has been altered
to implement a round-to-even rule. This means that output is
more likely to be identical to that on Unix-alikes.
o R CMD INSTALL now installs by default into the first library on
the library path if R was run in the current environment.
Similarly, R CMD REMOVE by default removes from that library.
R CMD INSTALL does a better job of removing its temporary
directory.
o R CMD BATCH now prints the result of proc.time() at the end of
the output, as it long has on Unix-alikes.
o More of the messages from the script editor are translatable.
o There is support for x86_64 cross-compilers as well as for ix86.
o mingw-runtime >= 3.11 is needed to build R. (E.g., it provides
isblank that was previously missing.)
o src/extra/trio has been updated to 1.12.
o malloc.c has been updated to version 2.8.3. This version has a
slightly different allocation strategy, and is likely to work
a little better close to address space limits but may give
more warnings about reaching the total allocation before
successfully allocating.
o file.access() would give an error if asking about execute
permission on Vista: the underlying C function has been
changed to be incompatible with POSIX and we now work around this.
o Packages are now compiled with -O3. (R itself has been since
2.3.0.)
o Packages can have a 'cleanup.win' script to cleanup after
configure.win etc.
o The toolset described in the R Installation and Administration
manual for building on Windows is now partially available in
an executable installer.
o The messages about being unable to update package and search
index files when installing packages without sufficient
permissions to update R are now suppressed (as Windows often
reports inaccurately about file permissions).
BUG FIXES
o md5check.exe works again (it was throwing spurious differences
after a compiler update).
o Some links in .chm help files were not working. (PR#9586)
o rcmd Rdiff was not working (used by R CMD check).
o Workaround a Windows' mktime bug that affected the POSIXct to
POSIXlt conversion during leap days in leap years prior to
1970 in timezones which were on DST at the time. (PR#9572)
o system() could have overflowed a buffer with a very long
command line that contained quotes.
**************************************************
* *
* 2.4 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.4.1 patched
BUG FIXES
o Using the AltGr key in the script editor was treated as a control key.
This was fixed for the rest of Rgui in R 0.9.1, and unfixed by the
contributed code implementing the script editor. (PR#9430)
o Returning focus to a window (e.g. the script editor after
saving) no longer changes the size or position, e.g. leaving a
maximized window maximized.
o When reading from pipes (which includes pipe(open="r") and
system() with intern=TRUE or show.output.on.console=TRUE in
Rgui) it is now possible to interrupt the command and the Rgui
console will be responsive whilst it is running (and R will
take up far less of the CPU). (Probably also fixes PR#7634.)
o menu.ttest2() in example package 'windlgs' was broken.
o CHM help is now converted with support for the \encoding{} section.
o etc/Makeconf was being left out of builds of the installer.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.4.1
UNCATEGORIZED
o Inno Setup >= 5.1.7 is now required to build the installer.
o Reverted 2.4.0 change that required case-sensitive specification of
commands to R CMD.
o The Simplified Chinese menu messages were in the wrong format,
causing Rgui to crash on startup. (PR#9277)
o Menu messages are now available in a Spanish translation.
o The pointsize of fonts in the windows() graphics device may now
be set to any positive integer.
o Building customized installers failed because the startup
options weren't being handled properly.
o If Rconsole settings were such that R could not start properly,
it crashed. It now suggests starting with the --vanilla
option, which now does not load Rconsole. Additionally, an
option --no-Rconsole has been added for completeness and
debugging.
o shell.exec() now gives an error and a reason when it fails
(rather than continuing silently as before).
o R CMD SHLIB again uses PKG_LIBS in files Makevars[.win] (it did
not in R 2.4.0).
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.4.0
UNCATEGORIZED
o The language for menus and messages can be set in the 'Rconsole'
file and (for future messages/sessions) from the GUI
preferences.
o The initial setting for console buffering can be set in the
'Rconsole' file and (for future sessions) from the GUI
preferences.
o The installer can set defaults for MDI/SDI display, help style,
and use of the --internet2 startup option. Custom builds of R
can change these defaults. The standard build now defaults to
CHM help.
o If CHM help is selected, but is not present (e.g. a package was
cross- compiled on Unix), the help system defaults to text
help.
o getGraphicsEvent() now writes its prompt to the standard output
stream, so it can be captured by sink() or capture.output().
o getGraphicsEvent() now leaves the standard graphics window menus
in place, so those functions are available while waiting for
an event.
o iconv.dll has been updated to 1.11, which has some improvements
for CJK languages under Windows (e.g. support for the Euro).
o Rcmd and R CMD check the name of Perl scripts, so errors like 'R
CMD install' are detected.
o The default limit for --max-mem-size has been changed: see the rw-FAQ.
o The .chm files are now given a title identifying the package.
o There are new utilities 'Rcmd Sweave' and 'Rcmd Stangle' for
processing of Sweave documentation.
INSTALLING PACKAGES
o It is now possible to use relative paths as 'lib' in
install.packages(), not just absolute ones.
o Installing packages (in particular saving an image and preparing
for lazy-loading and lazydata) is now done in a C locale for
consistency with Unix. (This will only possibly affect CJK
locales, where some checks on the validity of symbols and
strings might be locale-dependent.)
o There is a new file etc/Makeconf that provides an approximation
to the Unix version and may help with src/Makefile's.
C-LEVEL CHANGES
o There is now a similar embedding interface to that under Unix,
using Rf_initEmbeddedR / Rf_endEmbeddedR.
o The C-level *printf functions have been replaced by those from
the trio library, which ensures a higher level of C99
compliance without the need for lots of Windows-specific
workarounds.
o Entry points which are hidden in libR.so on Unix are now also
hidden in R.dll. (Just over half the entry points are hidden,
which speeds up loading.)
o It is possible to select (in MkRules) the type of debug symbol
used, and this now defaults to 'dwarf-2' (which is more
efficient than the previous default of 'stabs'). More parts
of R are now built with debug symbols when DEBUG=T.
o The symbols in graphapp are now remapped to start with GA_, so
any code making use of graphapp will need to be recompiled.
BUILDING R
o mingw-runtime >= 3.10 is required to build R (a bug fix in the
handling of MBCS code is required). This is enforced by a
check in building Rpwd.exe.
o At the time of writing mingw-runtime-3.10 was not listed on the
MinGW downloads page, but it is available from
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mingw/mingw-runtime-3.10.tar.gz?download
BUG FIXES
o The menu items for source and load/save workspace/history and
drag-and-drop can now be used for paths on network shares
(starting with \\).
o Using lines of more than 1000 chars in an R file in batch mode
could crash R.
o If the input line limit (1024 bytes) was exceeded whilst pasting
in, a byte was lost and the last byte input from the keyboard
was repeated after the paste.
o The script editor would only load 1000 bytes if the locale in
use was not the system locale. (PR#9254)
**************************************************
* *
* 2.3 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.3.1 patched
BUG FIXES
o winMenuAdd() could crash when too many menus were added. (PR#8961)
o The data editor could crash when too much was pasted into it.
o dirname() converted paths involving network shares to forward slashes.
(PR#8892)
o R could crash when very low on memory. (PR#8981)
o Due to a typo, R CMD Rd2dvi would not work with MiKTeX.
o Objects from Fortran 9X sources no longer need to be declared to
R CMD SHLIB/INSTALL via OBJS in Makevars.win.
o There is a new option to make a .msi Microsoft Installer,
intended for use by sysadmins doing automated installs. See
the 'R Installation and Administration Manual'. (Thanks to
David del Campo (Dept of Statistics, University of Oxford) for
suggesting WiX and building a prototype installer.)
o It was intended that saving the GUI preferences would default to
the home directory, but Windows only accepted paths with \
separators at that point, ignoring others with no error
message.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.3.1
UNCATEGORIZED
o In the GUI preferences editor, the font size can be set to
values not in the drop down list. (The number of choices in
the list has been increased.) Font names not in the drop-down
font list can be chosen.
o The MinGW C function wcrtomb was only working for Latin-1
characters, and it had been replaced. This affected the
specification of 'pch' as a character, and some little-used
aspects of plotmath.
o The installer generated a link in the Program menu to a
no-longer existent help page.
o Opening a device via windows(resize="fixed") would sometimes
fail with a message about 'outer margins too large'. (PR#8857)
o Sys.setlocale() interprets LC_CTYPE=C as a request for CP1252,
as the startup code long has. (This is necessary to avoid
various crashes in the MinGW runtime code.)
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.3.0
UNCATEGORIZED
o There is an error handler for access violations and illegal
instructions, which issues a traceback and error message, then
returns to the top level. This is switched off after 10 uses
in a session. Note that such errors can be the result of
damage to the code or objects in memory, so it is advisable to
save your work and restart R unless you know exactly what
happened.
o There is a new function choose.dir() to choose a folder (as used
for 'Change dir...' on the File menu in Rgui.)
o New function shortPathName() to convert names to DOS-style paths
(8+3 names and no spaces).
o Added workaround to Windows graphics devices (windows(),
win.metafile(), etc.) to allow callers to choose not to
restore the focus to the console. The interface to this will
likely change in a future release.
o For compatibility with Unix, the following environment variables
are checked for a writable directory for the R session
temporary directory:
TMPDIR TMP TEMP R_USER
(the last will always succeed). The changes are that TMPDIR
is checked first and that the values are checked to be a
directory.
o sprintf() now tries to ensure the output is C99-compliant, with
e.g. 1.23e+08 not 1.23e+008 as given by MSVCRT.dll.
o Rterm now responds to Ctrl-C during input (Ctrl-Break always
worked). This means ^C is no longer echoed.
o The minimum value for --max-mem-size is now 32M (rather than 16M).
o file.info() now supports files bigger than 2Gb (the size was
reported incorrectly before, since Windows' stat call only
supports smaller files).
o The installer executable now has the file version information
set appropriately.
o The DLL version number is now 2.xy.svn_revision.
o There is now aggressive protection of the setting of the FPU
control word: it is reset to 64-bit mantissa and rounding mode
before evaluating every expression. This should prevent the
implicit loading of DLLs changing to 53-bit mantissa, but has
a small performance penalty.
o The file open dialogs now list *.ssc and *.S files in addition
to *.q files as "S files".
o readClipboard() and writeClipboard() now support formats other
than text. A new function getClipboardFormats() reports on
available formats.
o The Rgui console now supports '\r' in output as a
non-destructive return to the left margin in the same way as
Rterm (it was previously ignored). Note that copy/cut of
overtyped output will not necessarily pick up the visible
layer of text.
o The "Edit|GUI preferences..." dialog now allows Rconsole files
to be loaded as well as saved. A new function loadRconsole()
has also been added.
INTERNATIONALIZATION
o There is no longer a separate 'East Asian' version of R.dll.
(Also, msvcp60.dll is no longer used as libmingwex now
supplies suitable functions.)
o There is now MBCS support for the line editor in Rterm.exe.
(Contributed by Haruki Koyanagi.)
o On NT-based versions of Windows, Unicode characters are used to
draw on the console, pager, editor and windows() family of
devices in multi-byte locales. (This allows the user to
select a locale other than the one Windows is running in, and
with suitable fonts see the intended characters. Menus and
dialogs should also work in the selected locale. A Windows
quirk means that window titles (which includes the legends for
the buttons used in the Preferences dialog box) use a font in
the system locale.
o Added a few mappings from Windows locale names (e.g. "chinese",
"chs", "cht", "ptb", "spanish", "esp", "esm", "esn") to
language names. There is still scope for confusion: LC_ALL=es
is Estonian, and LANGUAGE=es is Spanish.
o Spanish (as used in Spain) has been added to the list of
installation languages.
INSTALLING PACKAGES
o R CMD INSTALL will now clean up after interruption (by Ctrl-C, at
least where supported by the shell).
o R CMD INSTALL --docs now has more options.
o Links to package 'methods' are now fixed up, and R CMD INSTALL
no longer reports as missing links to 'datasets' and
'grDevices' which would be fixed up.
o There is now support for compiling Fortran 90/95 code in
packages: see 'Writing R Extensions'.
o Packages can now supply export files pkgname/src/pkgname-win.def:
package 'stats' does so.
o The restriction on the number of dots in a package name (which
stemmed from an undocumented restriction in ld.exe) has been worked
around.
C-LEVEL CHANGES
o This version of R expects a complete double-complex BLAS to be
available, and so customized (e.g. ATLAS and ACML) versions of
Rblas.dll need to be rebuilt. (The pre-compiled ones available on
CRAN have been updated.)
o The ACML optimized BLAS can be used for LAPACK: see the 'R
Installation and Administration Manual'.
o Since the Goto BLAS is no longer available for Windows, support
for it has been withdrawn.
o The assembler exponentiation code has been updated to that from
glibc 2.3.6.
o The import libraries libR.a, libRblas.a, libRlapack.a and
libproxy.a are no longer used, as we now link directly to the
corresponding DLL (except that a local version of libRblas.a
is needed to build R.dll, since R.dll and Rblas.dll are
mutually dependent).
o Import libraries are now made by default without -k (--kill-at).
This might be relevant for contributed software using R's
macros.
o The default optimization level for code in R (but not packages)
has been changed from -O2 to -O3, since space taken by
compiled code is no longer much of an issue. This will result
is a small performance increase.
o When making DLLs, the objects are no longer wrapped in an
archive en route (this was needed to avoid line-length limits
on an earlier shell).
o When making standalone Rmath, the static library is now
libRmath.a and the import library is called libRmath.dll.a.
BUG FIXES
o iconv() was not always getting the current charset ("") right,
especially if the locale was set in a running R session.
o gzfile() now always ensures that the underlying file is opened
in binary mode (this is only an issue on Windows). This
solves some problems with reading compressed data files via
gzfile().
o winMenuAdd() now has no limits on the number of menus or items,
and names are now limited to 500 (not 50) bytes.
o Several fixes to Rproxy have been submitted by Thomas Baier, so
it handles more types of objects.
o Outputting \b in Rgui deleted the last byte and not the last
character.
**************************************************
* *
* 2.2 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.2.1 patched
BUG FIXES
o Opening any window (pager/editor/windows() device) was resetting
the LC_CTYPE in the locale to the system default.
o formatC() sometimes gave spurious leading spaces on Windows (PR#8337).
o Workaround in unlink() for a Windows-run-time problem with
deleting directories with leading spaces in the name.
o tempdir() and tempfile() use all backslashes again (2.2.1 did not).
o When a graphics window was double-buffered, it would update too
frequently while waiting for input, overloading some remote
display utilities.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.2.1
UNCATEGORIZED
o Using the latest binutils allows us to distribute Rgui.exe and
Rterm.exe as large-address-aware (see the rw-FAQ Q2.9).
o 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.
o Overwrite mode in the console now works for MBCS charsets.
(Patch contributed by Haruki Koyanagi.)
o Input from the Rgui console was changing the letter 255 (ÿ in Latin-2)
in the character set to letter 1.
o R CMD REMOVE in 2.2.0 removed the package(s) but failed to remake the
indices.
o 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.)
o The installer was missing doc/html/index.html.
o Windows was sometimes incorrectly labelling times on BST as on GMT,
e.g. "1972-07-01 01:00:00 GMT Standard Time".
o Closing the script editor could leave Rgui in an unstable
state. (PR#8288)
o Support has been added for the ACML optimized BLAS: see the 'R
Installation and Administration Manual'.
o winMenuAdd() had a limit of 16 additional menus but only
allocated 10: it now has the limit of 16 as intended.
o Clicking on the left part of the MDI radiobutton in the
preferences dialog failed.
o A different algorithm is used to find the R session temporary
directory, one that is more likely to succeed.
o For compatibility with Unix, tempfile() names have a random hex
suffix (and not a decimal one), and there are many more values
to choose from.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.2.0
UNCATEGORIZED
o 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.
o 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.
o library.dynam() temporarily adds the <package>/libs dir to the
path so that dependent DLLs can be put there and found with no
further action.
o 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.
o There are now Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Traditional) and
Russian translations of the Rgui menus.
o 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.
o savePlot() now allows extensions '.emf' and '.eps'.
o The script editor menu no longer has an option to exit R (as the
pager and graphics menus do not).
o Installation is now available in Finnish.
o install.packages() now detect members of a bundle which are in use
and so skips the bundle (as it does for packages).
o MiKTeX is now recognised and the command-line set suitably for it.
o 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.
o The sample R_HOME/etc/Rprofile file has been renamed to
Rprofile.site (the documented name for such a file for some
years).
o mingw-runtime-3.8 is now required to build R (as it contains
expm1).
**************************************************
* *
* 2.1 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.1.1 patched
BUG FIXES
o 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.
o Added workaround in Sys.timezone() for Windows' confusion over
the GMT timezone.
o Windows was sometimes leaving behind temporary files associated
with anonymous file() connections - we now try to clean up
after it.
o 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).
o formatC() with an exponential format sometimes did not line the
fields up correctly.
o The 'Open Script' button shown from the pager toolbar in MDI
mode was set up incorrectly and liable to crash R. (PR#8060)
o seek(origin = "end") was repositioning to the wrong
location. (PR#7896)
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.1.1
UNCATEGORIZED
o The installer allows a choice of languages. Note that
uninstallation will happen in the language chosen for
installation.
o A menu item has been added for RSiteSearch().
o 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().
o Translation of the filters in file load/save dialog spaces was
being handled incorrectly by gettext, and is now not
attempted.
o Attempting to plot repeatedly to the same metafile sometimes
crashed R. (PR#7821: it is unclear why Windows does not allow
this.)
o Using the mouse scroll wheel in the data editor sometimes caused
it to scroll out of range and crash or display garbage.
o 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.
o 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".
o Inno Setup >= 5.1.2 is now required to build the installer.
o For some operations on windows() and related devices the first
text drawn could be improperly sized. (PR#7860).
o R would crash when ESC was pressed during locator(). (PR#7873).
o seek() was not always reporting the correct position on files >
2Gb. (PR#7879)
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.1.0
UNCATEGORIZED
o There is no longer a miniR distribution.
o Support for seek() on > 2Gb files has been added.
o 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"))
o 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.
o The new (in R 2.0.0) graphics pars "lend", "ljoin" and "lmitre"
are now implemented for the Windows devices.
o `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.
o R CMD / Rcmd now set HOME if unset, e.g. for use in Rcmd check.
o The installer now offers the option (by default unchecked) of a
`quick launch icon" for R.
o par(ask = TRUE) now takes input from the graphics window, rather
than from the console.
o Rcmd REMOVE works more similarly to Unix, setting the default
library from R_LIBS if the latter is set.
o install.packages() can install source packages as well as binary
ones.
o shQuote() now defaults to type="cmd" on Windows.
o 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.
o 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.
o select.list() now looks up the current font size and chooses its
window size based on that. It allows multiple preselections
if multiple=TRUE.
o 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.
o 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.
o The font list in the Preferences screen has been expanded to
include fonts used in `East Asian' terminals.
o 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.
o 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.
**************************************************
* *
* 2.0 SERIES NEWS *
* *
**************************************************
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.0.1 patched
BUG FIXES
o 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().
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.0.1
GUI CHANGES
o There is a new menu item to set a CRAN mirror.
BUG FIXES
o jpeg(), png() and bmp() were not handling background colours properly.
o 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 \ !
o Changes to help() meant that help(topic, chmhelp=TRUE) was no
longer working if `topic' was an alias. (PR#7269)
o Recent changes caused (D)COM to sometimes go into infinite loops.
o 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.
o Control keys in Tcl/Tk windows were not handled properly; Tcl/Tk
interacted badly with Rgui in other ways as well.
o R CMD SHLIB gave spurious error messages for inputs like all.f
and all.c.
o `make recommended' was not consulting the setting of WINHELP or
HELP, so failed if HHW was not installed.
o 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.
o select.list(preselect=) was not working. (PR#7328)
o The graphics recording mechanism windows(record = TRUE) could
cause memory corruption.
*********************************************************
* *
* News of 1.x.y and 2.0.0 is in file `CHANGES1' *
* News of 1.0.0 and earlier is in file `CHANGES0' *
* These files are available in the source *
* distribution. *
* *
*********************************************************
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