[R] [R-pkgs] RGtk2 2.20.x

[Michael Lawrence]

This is to announce the release of the RGtk2 2.20.x series. RGtk2 is an
interface between R and the GTK+ GUI toolkit and friends. The new release
updates the bindings to support up to GTK+ 2.20 (and remains backwards
compatible to 2.8). Previously, the interface supported only up to GTK+
2.12, which is several years old.

New features in GTK 2.20 (relative to 2.12) include:

* GtkInfoBar widget: Displays transient popup notifications, generally at
the bottom of the window (near the status bar).
* Off-screen rendering of widgets, e.g., automatically save a widget or
visualization to disk.
* GtkSpinner: Animated widget for indicating activity
* GtkToolPalette: Essentially a multi-row toolbar with drag and drop of
toolbar items between the palette and other tool item containers.

The bindings to Pango and Cairo were also updated to the latest stable
versions.

RGtk2 also adds a new library to its interface: GIO (2.22), a low-level
library supporting asynchronous streaming I/O, mounting of volumes,
networking, etc. Might be useful.

There is also a new mode of error handling available, that is disabled by
default. By setting the option "RGtk2::newErrorHandling" to TRUE, errors in
the libraries will result in errors in R (instead of warnings), and the
error object is no longer returned, which often simplifies return values by
no longer requiring a list to hold both the error and the original return
value. This is probably a more sensible strategy.

Windows users: The new binaries for Windows are being built against 2.20, so
you'll need to get GTK+ 2.20 (or higher, 2.22 is released but does not
really add any new features) for Windows at:
http://gtk-win.sourceforge.net/home/index.php/en/Downloads.

Thanks,
Michael

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