[R] Where is the best place to get ALL the changes between versions?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Michael Grant wrote:

> There seems to be a change in the behavior of the
> function ' mean() ' in 1.40.
>
> In earlier versions, the application of mean to a
> dataframe (all numeric)would return the aggregate mean
> of all of the columns. Now, in 1.40 application of
> mean to the dataframe returns a list of the column
> means. The new 'help' documents the new behavior. So
> the change is obviously intend
>
> I read the "changes" document distributed with 1.40
> and saw no mention of 'mean'. Is there a place where
> all of the changes are documented? This would be a
> help in maintaining/upgrading models and would save
> tedious debugging in the longer.

It's called NEWS.  There is no "changes" document, but the Windows port
has CHANGES which starts

                Windows-specific changes to R
                =============================

See the file NEWS for changes that affect all versions of R.


And NEWS says

    o   mean() has `data frame' method applying mean column-by-column.
        When applied to non-numeric data mean() now returns NA rather
        than a confusing error message (for compatibility with S4).
        Logicals are still coerced to numeric.


So it's all there if you care to look.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._