R-2.6.1 is released

[Peter Dalgaard]

I've rolled up R-2.6.1.tar.gz a short while ago.

This is a maintenance release and fixes a number of mostly minor bugs
and platform issues, as well as a couple of major problems.

Probably, the most important issues were
- save-to-postscript on Windows
- tcltk event loop with X11
- build issue on recent MacOSX

See the full list of changes below.

You can get it (in a short while) from

http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.6.1.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:

070cca21d9f8a6af15f992edb47a24d5  AUTHORS
eb723b61539feef013de476e68b5c50a  COPYING
a6f89e2100d9b6cdffcea4f398e37343  COPYING.LIB
619aa712a6032fdbffd4f0c69d962859  FAQ
70447ae7f2c35233d3065b004aa4f331  INSTALL
b6ed12e20f627a466378fc28006dc9c9  NEWS
88bbd6781faedc788a1cbd434194480c  ONEWS
4f004de59e24a52d0f500063b4603bcb  OONEWS
19c35a69e1afa73f5f70f91ff9939233  R-2.6.1.tar.gz
19c35a69e1afa73f5f70f91ff9939233  R-latest.tar.gz
433182754c05c2cf7a04ad0da474a1d0  README
020479f381d5f9038dcb18708997f5da  RESOURCES
1ad28cbc84485ccdf4ce5721b34ed645  THANKS

Here is the relevant bit of the NEWS file:

                CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.6.1

NEW FEATURES

    o   The "data.frame" and "factor" methods for [[ now support
        the 'exact' argument introduced in 2.6.0.

    o   plot.lm() gains a new argument 'cex.caption' to allow the
        size of the captions to be controlled.

    o   A series of changes make the CHARSXP cache introduced in 2.6.0
        faster (and in some cases many times faster) in sessions with
        a large number (e.g. a million) of unique character strings,
        and also if there are many empty strings.

    o   embedFonts(), bitmap() and dev2bitmap() explicitly turn off
        auto-rotation in Ghostscript when generating PDF.

    o   The canonical architecture is no longer checked when loading
        packages using a non-empty sub-architecture, since it is
        possible to (e.g.) build packages for i386-pc-linux-gnu on both
        that architecture and on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.

    o   Deparsing will (if option warnIncomplete is set) warn on
        strings longer than the parser limit (8192 bytes).

    o   url() now uses the UserAgent header in http transactions in
        the same way as download.file() (making use of option
        "HTTPUserAgent").

BUG FIXES

    o   iconv() is again able to translate character strings with
        embedded nuls (such as those in UCS-2).

    o   new.packages() and update.packages() failed when called on an
        empty library, since old.packages() threw an error.
        old.packages() now returns NULL (as documented) in that case.

    o   Builds on Mac OS X 10.4 or higher now allocate enough space
        in the binary headers to relocate dependent libraries into the
        framework.

    o   R CMD build now computes the exclusion list on the copy it
        makes: this avoids problems if the original sources contain
        symbolic links (which are resolved in the copy).  Thanks to
        Michael Lawrence for diagnosis and patch.

    o   object.size() had slightly too low a size for objects of type "S4".

    o   symbol() in plotmath expressions was only accepting valid
        character strings, which made it impossible to specify symbols
        such as aleph (obtained by symbol("\300")) in a UTF-8 locale.

    o   An event handling issue caused autorepeat functions to
        misbehave with tcltk (notably scrollbars).

    o   plot(sin, -5, 5) gives ylab 'sin(x)' again, where it resulted
        in 'x(x)' in 2.6.0.  Further,  plot(sin)  again plots from
        [0,1] also in cases where a previously used coordinate system
        differs.

    o   curve() with unspecified 'from', 'to' and 'xlim' now reuses the
        previous x limits, and not slightly larger ones.

    o   It was intended that R code filenames in packages should start
        with an ASCII letter or digits (and R CMD INSTALL uses that),
        but the test used in R CMD build ([A-Za-z0-9]) was
        locale-specific (and excluded t to y in Estonian, for
        example).  (PR#10351)

    o   'R CMD build' could misbehave when faced with files with CRLF
        line endings *and* no line ending on the final line of the
        file, removing the last byte of the file.

    o   DF[i, j] failed in 2.6.0 if j was a logical vector selecting a
        single column.

    o   Unix x11() would fail if a valid 'display' was specified but
        DISPLAY was unset. (PR#10379)

    o   postscript() was not always ignoring .Postscript.Options in
        the workspace (where it should not have occurred).

    o   help.search() would give an error if it found a badly
        installed package, even if 'package' was not specified.

    o   tclServiceMode() (package tcltk) now works under Unix-alikes.
        (Although documented, it used only to work under Windows.)

    o   As Mac OS X 10.5.0 comes with incompatible /bin/sh shell, we
        force SHELL=/bin/bash (which is ok) in that case. [Only for
        2.6.x: another solution is used in 2.7.0.]

    o   Deliberately using malformed source attributes no longer
        causes deparsing/printing of functions to crash R. (PR#10437)

    o   R CMD check and R CMD INSTALL now work with (some) directory
        names containing spaces.

    o   choose(n, k) gave incorrect values for negative n and small k.

    o   plot.ts(x,y) could use wrong default labels; fixed thanks to
        Antonio, Fabio di Narzo.

    o   reshape() got column names out of sync with contents in some
        cases; found by Antonio, Fabio Di Narzo.

    o   ar(x) for short 'x' (i.e. length <= 10) could fail because the
        default 'order.max' was >= length(x) which is non-sensical.

    o   Keyboard events in getGraphicsEvent() could cause stack
        imbalance errors (PR#10453)


-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark          Ph:  (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)                  FAX: (+45) 35327907