The build system rolled up R-2.15.0.tar.gz (codename "Easter Beagle") at 9:00 this morning. This is the first release of the 2.15 series and contains several new features and changes; see the list below for details.
You can get the source code from
http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.15.0.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:
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MD5 (COPYING) = eb723b61539feef013de476e68b5c50a
MD5 (COPYING.LIB) = a6f89e2100d9b6cdffcea4f398e37343
MD5 (FAQ) = c6cf7cff235e9bd3c823e6a1a3d76cd5
MD5 (INSTALL) = 37adac6d0fbadf25b5a40e3f7535415e
MD5 (NEWS) = 31dee994d35636656c9e254bfb819d7c
MD5 (NEWS.html) = 0551e23b675fa9dc709830d1a4ee738c
MD5 (ONEWS) = 0c3e10eef74439786e5fceddd06dac71
MD5 (OONEWS) = b0d650eba25fc5664980528c147a20db
MD5 (R-latest.tar.gz) = 905f638990492618559202cc1e48a867
MD5 (README) = 296871fcf14f49787910c57b92655c76
MD5 (RESOURCES) = a7a02d98a407c3cb8674d067608f14fc
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MD5 (R-2/R-2.15.0.tar.gz) = 905f638990492618559202cc1e48a867
This is the relevant part of the NEWS file
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.15.0:
SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:
o The behaviour of unlink(recursive = TRUE) for a symbolic link to
a directory has changed: it now removes the link rather than the
directory contents (just as rm -r does).
On Windows it no longer follows reparse points (including
junctions and symbolic links).
NEW FEATURES:
o Environment variable RD2DVI_INPUTENC has been renamed to
RD2PDF_INPUTENC.
o .Deprecated() becomes a bit more flexible, getting an old
argument.
o Even data-only packages without R code need a namespace and so
may need to be installed under R 2.14.0 or later.
o assignInNamespace() has further restrictions on use apart from at
top-level, as its help page has warned. Expect it to be disabled
from programmatic use in the future.
o system() and system2() when capturing output report a non-zero
status in the new "status" attribute.
o kronecker() now has an S4 generic in package methods on which
packages can set methods. It will be invoked by X %x% Y if
either X or Y is an S4 object.
o pdf() accepts forms like file = "|lpr" in the same way as
postscript().
o pdf() accepts file = NULL. This means that the device does NOT
create a PDF file (but it can still be queried, e.g., for font
metric info).
o format() (and hence print()) on "bibentry" objects now uses
options("width") to set the output width.
o legend() gains a text.font argument. (Suggested by Tim Paine,
PR#14719.)
o nchar() and nzchar() no longer accept factors (as integer
vectors). (Wish of PR#6899.)
o summary() behaves slightly differently (or more precisely, its
print() method does). For numeric inputs, the number of NAs is
printed as an integer and not a real. For dates and datetimes,
the number of NAs is included in the printed output (the latter
being the wish of PR#14720).
The "data.frame" method is more consistent with the default
method: in particular it now applies zapsmall() to
numeric/complex summaries.
o The number of items retained with options(warn = 0) can be set by
options(nwarnings=).
o There is a new function assignInMyNamespace() which uses the
namespace of the function it is called from.
o attach() allows the default name for an attached file to be
overridden.
o bxp(), the work horse of boxplot(), now uses a more sensible
default xlim in the case where at is specified differently from
1:n, see the discussion on R-devel, <URL:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2011-November/062586.html>.
o New function paste0(), an efficient version of paste(*, sep=""),
to be used in many places for more concise (and slightly more
efficient) code.
o Function setClass() in package methods now returns, invisibly, a
generator function for the new class, slightly preferred to
calling new(), as explained on the setClass help page.
o The "dendrogram" method of str() now takes its default for
last.str from option str.dendrogram.last.
o New simple fitted() method for "kmeans" objects.
o The traceback() function can now be called with an integer
argument, to display a current stack trace. (Wish of PR#14770.)
o setGeneric() calls can be simplified when creating a new generic
function by supplying the default method as the def argument.
See ?setGeneric.
o serialize() has a new option xdr = FALSE which will use the
native byte-order for binary serializations. In scenarios where
only little-endian machines are involved (these days, close to
universal) and (un)serialization takes an appreciable amount of
time this may speed up noticeably transferring data between
systems.
o The internal (un)serialization code is faster for long vectors,
particularly with XDR on some platforms. (Based on a suggested
patch by Michael Spiegel.)
o For consistency, circles with zero radius are omitted by points()
and grid.circle(). Previously this was device-dependent, but
they were usually invisible.
o NROW(x) and NCOL(x) now work whenever dim(x) looks appropriate,
e.g., also for more generalized matrices.
o PCRE has been updated to version 8.30.
o The internal R_Srcref variable is now updated before the browser
stops on entering a function. (Suggestion of PR#14818.)
o There are 'bare-bones' functions .colSums(), .rowSums(),
.colMeans() and .rowMeans() for use in programming where ultimate
speed is required.
o The formerly internal function .package_dependencies() from
package tools for calculating (recursive) (reverse) dependencies
on package databases has been renamed to package_dependencies()
and is now exported.
o There is a new function optimHess() to compute the (approximate)
Hessian for an optim() solution if hessian = TRUE was forgotten.
o .filled.contour() is a 'bare-bones' function to add a
filled-contour rectangular plot to an already prepared plot
region.
o The stepping in debugging and single-step browsing modes has
changed slightly: now left braces at the start of the body are
stepped over for if statements as well as for for and while
statements. (Wish of PR#14814.)
o library() no longer warns about a conflict with a function from
package:base if the function has the same code as the base one
but with a different environment. (An example is Matrix::det().)
o When deparsing very large language objects, as.character() now
inserts newlines after each line of approximately 500 bytes,
rather than truncating to the first line.
o New function rWishart() generates Wishart-distributed random
matrices.
o Packages may now specify actions to be taken when the package is
loaded (setLoadActions()).
o options(max.print = Inf) and similar now give an error (instead
of warnings later).
o The "difftime" replacement method of units tries harder to
preserve other attributes of the argument. (Wish of PR#14839.)
o poly(raw = TRUE) no longer requires more unique points than the
degree. (Requested by John Fox.)
PACKAGE parallel:
o There is a new function mcmapply(), a parallel version of
mapply(), and a wrapper mcMap(), a parallel version of Map().
o A default cluster can be registered by the new function
setDefaultCluster(): this will be used by default in functions
such as parLapply().
o clusterMap() has a new argument .scheduling to allow the use of
load-balancing.
o There are new load-balancing functions parLapplyLB() and
parSapplyLB().
o makePSOCKCluster() has a new option useXDR = FALSE which can be
used to avoid byte-shuffling for serialization when all the nodes
are known to be little-endian (or all big-endian).
PACKAGE INSTALLATION:
o Non-ASCII vignettes without a declared encoding are no longer
accepted.
o C/C++ code in packages is now compiled with -NDEBUG to mitigate
against the C/C++ function assert being called in production use.
Developers can turn this off during package development with
PKG_CPPFLAGS = -UNDEBUG.
o R CMD INSTALL has a new option --dsym which on Mac OS X (Darwin)
dumps the symbols alongside the .so file: this is helpful when
debugging with valgrind (and especially when installing packages
into R.framework). [This can also be enabled by setting the
undocumented environment variable PKG_MAKE_DSYM, since R 2.12.0.]
o R CMD INSTALL will test loading under all installed
sub-architectures even for packages without compiled code, unless
the flag --no-multiarch is used. (Pure R packages can do things
which are architecture-dependent: in the case which prompted
this, looking for an icon in a Windows R executable.)
o There is a new option install.packages(type = "both") which tries
source packages if binary packages are not available, on those
platforms where the latter is the default.
