R 2.14.2 is released + R anniversary

[Peter Dalgaard]

The build system rolled up R-2.14.2.tar.gz (codename "Gift-Getting Season") at 9:00 this morning. This is intended to be the final round-up release of the 2.14 series; see the list below for details.

(The codename is still not part of the actual sources. That feature will have to wait for 2.15.0, "Easter Beagle").

This release also marks the 3rd anniversary of R-1.0.0.

You can get the source code from

   http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.14.2.tar.gz

or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you.

Binaries for various platforms will appear in due course.

For the R Core Team

Peter Dalgaard



These are the md5sums for the freshly created files, in case you wish
to check that they are uncorrupted:

MD5 (AUTHORS) = cbf6da8f886ccd8d0dda0cc7ffd1b8ec
MD5 (COPYING) = eb723b61539feef013de476e68b5c50a
MD5 (COPYING.LIB) = a6f89e2100d9b6cdffcea4f398e37343
MD5 (FAQ) = 748eae477f4c3c8d1f16cc82d9035d18
MD5 (INSTALL) = 70447ae7f2c35233d3065b004aa4f331
MD5 (NEWS) = 7fc0a51c884e59daae6ea82d7c36af85
MD5 (NEWS.html) = 2fa78a01a352723ab3cc8e9796fb5c19
MD5 (ONEWS) = 0c3e10eef74439786e5fceddd06dac71
MD5 (OONEWS) = b0d650eba25fc5664980528c147a20db
MD5 (R-latest.tar.gz) = f5c8657543a293a80d025be58cf1ef71
MD5 (README) = 296871fcf14f49787910c57b92655c76
MD5 (RESOURCES) = 020479f381d5f9038dcb18708997f5da
MD5 (THANKS) = 159efc7bd4ae7b23dda07c1d431657bc
MD5 (R-2/R-2.14.2.tar.gz) = f5c8657543a293a80d025be58cf1ef71

This is the relevant part of the NEWS file 

CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.14.2:

  NEW FEATURES:

    o The internal untar() (as used by default by R CMD INSTALL) now
      knows about some pax headers which bsdtar (e.g., the default tar
      for Mac OS >= 10.6) can incorrectly include in tar files, and
      will skip them with a warning.

    o PCRE has been upgraded to version 8.21: as well as bug fixes and
      greater Perl compatibility, this adds a JIT pattern compiler,
      about which PCRE's news says 'large performance benefits can be
      had in many situations'.  This is supported on most but not all R
      platforms.

    o Function compactPDF() in package tools now takes the default for
      argument gs_quality from environment variable GS_QUALITY: there
      is a new value "none", the ultimate default, which prevents
      GhostScript being used in preference to qpdf just because
      environment variable R_GSCMD is set.  If R_GSCMD is unset or set
      to "", the function will try to find a suitable GhostScript
      executable.

    o The included version of zlib has been updated to 1.2.6.

    o For consistency with the logLik() method, nobs() for "nls" files
      now excludes observations with zero weight.  (Reported by Berwin
      Turlach.)

  UTILITIES:

    o R CMD check now reports by default on licenses not according to
      the description in 'Writing R Extensions'.

    o R CMD check has a new option --as-cran to turn on most of the
      customizations that CRAN uses for its incoming checks.

  PACKAGE INSTALLATION:

    o R CMD INSTALL will now no longer install certain file types from
      inst/doc: these are almost certainly mistakes and for some
      packages are wasting a lot of space.  These are Makefile, files
      generated by running LaTeX, and unless the package uses a
      vignettes directory, PostScript and image bitmap files.

      Note that only PDF vignettes have ever been supported: some of
      these files come from DVI/PS output from the Sweave defaults
      prior to R 2.13.0.

  BUG FIXES:

    o R configured with --disable-openmp would mistakenly set
      HAVE_OPENMP (internal) and SUPPORT_OPENMP (in Rconfig.h) even
      though no OpenMP flags were populated.

    o The getS3method() implementation had an old computation to find
      an S4 default method.

    o readLines() could overflow a buffer if the last line of the file
      was not terminated.  (PR#14766)

    o R CMD check could miss undocumented S4 objects in packages which
      used S4 classes but did not Depends: methods in their DESCRIPTION
      file.

    o The HTML Help Search page had malformed links.  (PR#14769)

    o A couple of instances of lack of protection of SEXPs have been
      squashed. (PR#14772, PR#14773)

    o image(x, useRaster=TRUE) misbehaved on single-column x.
      (PR#14774)

    o Negative values for options("max.print") or the max argument to
      print.default() caused crashes.  Now the former are ignored and
      the latter trigger an error.  (PR#14779)

    o The text of a function body containing more than 4096 bytes was
      not properly saved by the parser when entered at the console.

    o Forgetting the #endif tag in an Rd file could cause the parser to
      go into a loop.  (Reported by Hans-Jorg Bibiko.)

    o str(*, ....., strict.width="cut") now also obeys list.len = n.
      (Reported by S"oren Vogel.)

    o Printing of arrays did not have enough protection (C level),
      e.g., in the context of capture.output().  (Reported by Herv'e
      Pag`es and Martin Morgan.)

    o pdf(file = NULL) would produce a spurious file named NA.
      (PR#14808)

    o list2env() did not check the type of its envir argument.
      (PR#14807)

    o svg() could segfault if called with a non-existent file path.
      (PR#14790)

    o make install can install to a path containing + characters.
      (PR#14798)

    o The edit() function did not respect the options("keep.source")
      setting. (Reported by Cleridy Lennert.)

    o predict.lm(*, type="terms", terms=*, se.fit=TRUE) did not work.
      (PR#14817)

    o There is a partial workaround for errors in the TRE
      regular-expressions engine with named classes and repeat counts
      of at least 2 in a MBCS locale (PR#14408): these are avoided when
      TRE is in 8-bit mode (e.g. for useBytes = TRUE and when all the
      data are ASCII).

    o The C function R_ReplDLLdo1() did not call top-level handlers.

    o The Quartz device was unable to detect window sessions on Mac OS
      X 10.7 (Lion) and higher and thus it was not used as the default
      device on the console.  Since Lion any application can use window
      sessions, so Quartz will now be the default device if the user's
      window session is active and R is not run via ssh which is at
      least close to the behavior in prior OS X versions.

    o mclapply() would fail in code assembling the translated error
      message if some (but not all) cores encountered an error.

    o format.POSIXlt(x) raised an arithmetic exception when x was an
      invalid object of class "POSIXlt" and parts were empty.

    o installed.packages() has some more protection against package
      installs going on in parallel.

    o .Primitive() could be mis-used to call .Internal() entry points.

--
Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com