[R-pkgs] New versions for the distr-family of packages

[Peter Ruckdeschel]

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New versions released for the distr family of package
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We would like to announce the availability on CRAN (with possibly a
minor delay until on every mirror) of new versions of our packages 
in the "distr"-family (version 2.1), i.e.; "distr", "distrEx", 
"distrSim", "distrTEst", "distrDoc",  "distrMod", and "distrTeach", 
as well as our supporting package "startupmsg" and the new
(supporting) package "SweaveListingUtils".

[all of them require R >= 2.6.0]

For details, please also refer to the NEWS file of the corresponding
package, accessible via NEWS("<pkgname>") [after require(<pkgname>)]

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Devel versions on r-forge
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Development of these packages is done under r-forge project /distr/:

http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/distr/
http://distr.r-forge.r-project.org/

If you find this project interesting and would like to collaborate, you are
warmly welcome. You may find more information on how to collaborate under

http://distr.r-forge.r-project.org/HOWTO-collaborate.txt

We look forward to receiving questions, comments and suggestions

Peter Ruckdeschel
Matthias Kohl

Below you find a list of major improvements in version 2.1:

%---------------------------------------------
SweaveListingUtils:
%---------------------------------------------
  + a new package devoted to joining markup provided by TeX package
      'listings' with Sweave;
  + also covers inclusion of code sniplets from an url
     (notably r-forge) in order to ease consistency
      of documentation with code that is being developed.
    see also ?lstinputSourceFromRForge and
    vignette "ExampleSweaveListingUtils"
%---------------------------------------------
distr
%---------------------------------------------
  COMPOUND DISTRIBUTIONS
  + new support of compound distributions,
      see ?CompoundDistribution, class?CompoundDistribution
  ENHANCED ACCURACY
  + by log scale
       Following Peter Dalgaard's hint
         https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-September/174295.html
       we use the log.p argument to be able to simulate accurately from
       the far out tails.
  + refined collapsing technique for DiscreteDistribution
  + more frequent use of FFT for convolution by better treatment of
      joint lattices
  AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF IMAGE DISTRIBUTION
  + slot r is now /much/ faster / slimmer for results of *,/,^
  + slot d for results of *,/, exp() now is correct at 0 by extrapolation
  COMFORT METHODS
  + getLow/getUp methods  (for "reasonable" endpoints for distributions with
       possibly unbounded support) for
       *DiscreteDistribution,
       *AbscontDistribution,
       *UnivarLebDecDistribution,
       *UnivarMixingDistribution
  + q.r, p.l (methods for right continuous quantile function
              and left continuous cdf) for
       * DiscreteDistribution
       * AbscontDistribution (takes care of constancy regions in p)
       * UnivarLebDecDistribution
       * UnivarMixingDistribution
  + prob methods (returning vectors/matrices of probabilities of support)
       + DiscreteDistribution
       + UnivarLebDecDistribution (conditional/unconditional)
  + p.ac, d.ac, p.discrete, d.discrete methods (for
UnivarLebDecDistribution)
        now conditional/unconditional
%---------------------------------------------
distrEx
%---------------------------------------------
  FUNCTIONALS
  + expectation gains explicit arguments to set accuracy locally;
  + median and IQR are now defined for UnivariateCondDistribution
  + cross-checked (and bug-fixed) particular functionals against
      general implementations
  DISTRIBUTIONS
  + gains distribution Pareto; ported from pkg actuar by Nataliya Horbenko
  DISTANCES:
  + introduces distances asymmetric total variation distances
     *OAsymTotalVarDist
     *AsymTotalVarDist
  + TotalVarDist and HellingerDist gain extra arguments
      to better control the integration range and exactness
%---------------------------------------------
distrMod
%---------------------------------------------
  MODELS
  + added mad.const to guarantee for mad-consistency in location scale model
      for general central distribution
  TRAFO
  + fixed some inconsistencies with slot trafo:
      now when trafo is a function, we try to keep it as a function under
      moves of the parametric model
  + trafo.fct() to access the "function" aspect of trafo
  + trafoEst() transforming an estimator of class "estimate"
      consistently  by a "trafo" function
  ESTIMATION
  + enhanced Covariance calculation for CvMDist-MDE
  + modified output in show - Confint-class
%---------------------------------------------
PLOTTING
%---------------------------------------------
+ enhanced automatic plotting range selection for distributions
+ ylim can now be matrix-valued giving panel-individual values
+ selection of panels to be plot by argument to.draw.arg
+ L2ParamFamily plot in distrMod is now as flexible as plot-methods in
    pkg distr
+ more flexible panel axis annotation
%---------------------------------------------
DOCUMENTATION:
%---------------------------------------------
+ updated large vignette "distr" in distrDoc
+ updated vignette "ExampleSweaveListingUtils" in pkg SweaveListingUtils
+ updated vignette "How to generate new distributions in packages distr,
    distrEx" in pkg distr
+ new section "Extension packages" in package-help to package distr,
     see ?distr
%---------------------------------------------
LICENSE:
%---------------------------------------------
- switched over to LGPL-3