As announced by Peter Dalgaard this morning, the latest update to R, R 2.9.1, has been released on schedule. If you roll your own builds of R, the sources are available now on CRAN. As of this writing none of the binary releases (for Windows and MacOS) have been updated yet: it will probably be a few days before those builds are completed by the R Core Team and propagated to the CRAN mirrors. This is a maintenance release and fixes a number of mostly minor issues. The complete list of changes appears after the jump. CHANGES IN R VERSION…
As announced by Peter Dalgaard this morning, the latest update to R, R 2.9.1, has been released on schedule. If you roll your own builds of R, the sources are available now on CRAN. As of this writing none of the binary releases (for Windows and MacOS) have been updated yet: it will probably be a few days before those builds are completed by the R Core Team and propagated to the CRAN mirrors.
This is a maintenance release and fixes a number of mostly minor issues. The complete list of changes appears after the jump.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.9.1
NEW FEATURES
o New function anyDuplicated(x) returns 0 (= FALSE) or the index
of the first duplicated entry of x.
o matplot(), matlines() and matpoints() now also obey a 'lend'
argument, determining line end styles. (Wish of PR#13619).
o bw.SJ(), bw.bcv() and bw.ucv() now gain an optional 'tol'
argument allowing more accurate estimates.
o new.packages() no longer regards packages with the same name
as a member of an installed bundle as 'new' (this is now
consistent with the dependency checks in install.packages()).
It no longer reports on partially installed bundles (since
members can be updated individually if a bundle is unbundled).
o old.packages() and hence updates.packages() will look for
updates to members of package bundles before updates to the
whole bundle: this allow bundles to be split and installations
updated.
o nlminb() gives better non-convergence messages in some cases.
o S3 method dispatch will support S4 class inheritance for S3
methods, for primitives and via UseMethod(), if the argument
S3methods=TRUE is given to setClass(). S4 method dispatch
will use S3 per-object inheritance if S3Class() is set on the
object. See ?Methods and the paper referenced there.
o R CMD INSTALL is more tolerant of (malformed) packages with a
'man' directory but no validly named .Rd files.
o R CMD check now reports where options are used that cause some
of the checks to be skipped.
o RSiteSearch has been updated to be consistent with the new
layout of the search site itself, which now includes separate
options for vignettes, views, and r-sig-mixed-models, as well
as changed names for r-help. (Contributed by Jonathan Baron.)
o That R CMD check makes use of a
<pkg>/tests/Examples/<pkg>-Ex.Rout.save file as a reference
result is now documented in 'Writing R Extensions'.
DEPRECATED & DEFUNCT
o print.atomic() (defunct since 1.9.0) has been removed since it
caused confusion for an S4 class union "atomic".
o png(type="cairo1") is deprecated -- it was only needed for
platforms with 1.0 <= cairo < 1.2.
BUG FIXES
o The ... argument was not handled properly when ... was found
in the enclosure of the current function, rather than in the
function header itself. (This caused integrate() to fail in
certain cases.)
o col2rgb("#00000080", TRUE) would return the background colour.
(Reported by Hadley Wickham.)
o interaction() now ensures that the levels of the result are unique.
o packageDescription() and hence sessionInfo() now report the correct
package version also for a non-attached loaded namespace of
a version different from the default lib.loc.
o smoothScatter() now also works when e.g. xlim[2] < xlim[1].
o Invalid use of sprintf() such as sprintf("%S%") now give an error
instead of a segmentation fault, as do very unusual cases such as
sprintf("%s", tryCatch(stop(), error=identity)). (It was
always documented that misuse could crash R in
platform-dependent ways.)
o parse_Rd() would mishandle braces when they occurred at
the start of a line within an R string in an Rd file (reported
by Alex Couture-Beil) or when they occurred in an R comment
(reported by Mark Bravington).
o readNEWS() missed version numbers with more than one digit.
o building R --without-x no longer fails (PR#13665)
o printCoefmat(cbind(0,1)) now works too (PR#13677)
o bw.SJ(c(1:99, 1e6)) now works too.
o Rd2txt() could not handle empty descriptions of items in an Rd
file (reported by Mark Bravington), and did not wrap long lists
of arguments if they were given in a single item.
o stars() would do a partial plot when called with plot = FALSE;
it now consistently returns the locations of the stars.
o Rd2latex() could not handle empty sections.
o old.packages() and hence update.packages() would fail on a
repository which contained only one package but with multiple
versions of that package.
o as.character.Rd() added extra braces when displaying two-argument
macros. (Report and fix by Manuel Eugster.)
o unsplit() was misbehaving in the case of single-column data
frames. (Reported by Will Gray.)
o as(I(1), "vector") and similar coercions from objects of
"unregistered" S3 classes now work.
o srcref records produced by parse() and parse_Rd() did not record
the encoding of the source file. (Reported by Romain Francois.)
o The X11 version of View() was misbehaving in MBCS locales, and
PgUp/PgDn now behave better, thanks to a patch from Ei-ji Nakama.
o R CMD check looked at the environment variable PDFLATEX, but
as from R 2.8.1 R CMD Rd2dvi used R_PDFLATEXCMD in
preference, and that was set by R CMD (and not PDFLATEX). Now
R CMD check looks at R_PDFLATEXCMD.
o sprintf() now signals an error when the result of single format
specification would be longer than the limit (8192 bytes); it would
return "somewhat random" results or segfault previously. (PR#13667)
Further, arguments of type "language" or "symbol" are no longer
allowed, as these, e.g., sprintf("%s", quote(list())), typically
lead to unexpected results or hard to understand error messages.
o The new (in 2.9.0) 'stringsAsFactors' argument to expand.grid()
was not working: it now does work but has default TRUE for
backwards compatibility.
o tcrossprod(<1d-array>, <matrix>) now does work when the arguments
are of compatible dimensions.
o qbinom() now is accurate also in (large size, small prob)
cases. (PR#13711)
o The calculation of the Spearman p-value in cor.test() is
slightly more accurate in some cases. (PR#13574)
o The digamma(), trigamma() and psigamma() functions could be
inaccurate for values of x around 1e-15 due to cancellation.
(PR#13714).
o median.default() was altered in 2.8.1 to use sum() rather
than mean(), although it was still documented to use mean().
This caused problems for POSIXt objects, for which mean() but
not sum() makes sense, so the change has been reverted.
o Assigning an extra 0-length column to a data frame by
DF$foo <- value gave a corrupt data frame rather than failing.
(PR#13724) This also happened for DF[["foo"]] <- value.
o R CMD INSTALL no longer gives a spurious warning about old R
versions ignoring multiple dependencies, if the conditions are
known to be satisfied.
o The test for setting dim() allowed a value with two or more
NAs to be set on a 0-length object. (PR#13729) Also, it
allowed an even number of negative values.
o xtfrm(), rank(), sort() and order() did not always make use of
custom comparison methods specific to the class of elements
being sorted.
o Increase NAMED value on 'seq' value in for() loop so loop code
cannot modify 'seq' value.
o Prevent rectangles of size < 0.5 pixel from disappearing in
Quartz when using rastered backend. (PR#13744)
o Printing _NA_complex_ had a low-level thinko; patch thanks to
Bill Dunlap.
o CP1257 encoding for postscript/PDF has been corrected. (PR#13736)
o aov() with an error term was evaluating the ... arguments in
2.9.0 whilst checking their names, so could fail by evaluating
them in the wrong place. (PR#13733)
o The print() method for arima() failed if all coefs were fixed.
o R CMD INSTALL --no-latex was not implemented in 2.9.0 (only).
o Added a needed PROTECT call in RunFinalizers to handle cases where
the routine is called recursively from a GC in a finalizer.
o Constructing error messages about unused arguments in calls to
closures no longer evaluates the arguments.
o qr(x, LAPACK=TRUE) did not coerce integer x to numeric.
o qr.coef() misbehaved in the LAPACK case with a matrix RHS, so
that solve(qr(x, LAPACK=TRUE)) gave wrong results. (Found by
Avraham Adler, PR#13762 by Ravi Varadhan.)