[R-SIG-Mac] Is it safe to upgrade to Somoma yet -- As far as R goes?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 31/10/2023 18:24, Kevin Thorpe wrote:
> 
>> On Oct 31, 2023, at 1:46 PM, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley using stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>> On 31/10/2023 13:47, Kevin Thorpe wrote:
>>> Hello.
>>> I saw that a minor release has been rolled up with binaries coming soon. My question is whether or not the issues identified (I’m thinking mainly of a window focus issue reported on this list) after Sonoma released have been patched in this version. I did not see anything specific in the summary of changes that went with the email notification to r-help.
>>
>> Because you are talking about R.app aka Mac-GUI and that is a separate project.  See
>> https://svn.r-project.org/R-packages/trunk/Mac-GUI/NEWS
>>
>> As for R itself, there are major ramifications of the un-announced replacement of libiconv in  macOS 14 and further changes in 14.1 (and who knows what else has been changed without being in the release notes).  I certainly would not use any version of R older than 4.3.2, and R-devel would be preferred for package development (and that will need further changes to R which I guess will be ported to R-patched in due course).
>>
>> With 14 you are likely to see silent substitutions in iconv() (which is used pervasively in R): in 14.1, Aborts from libiconv.  Although the latter is supposedly Open Source, only the 14.0 changes have been published thus far (and Apple often does not publish them for .x versions).
>>
> 
> Thank you for this reply. I have never used iconv() directly so looked it up and see it has to do with conversion of character encodings. I guess that means it can happen in the background, especially when importing data. Correct?

In many, many places 'in the background', at C level as well as R level. 
  As I said, it is 'pervasive'.

> It wasn’t clear to me if, "in 14.1, Aborts from libiconv,” means that in 14.1 when iconv() is used it will fail.
> 
> Would a fair interpretation of all this be to hold off a little while longer? If so, is there a spot, similar to the GUI NEWS you pointed me to, that I can watch myself and not keep bothering the community?

R-devel's NEWS file.

If you develop R packages or if you work with non-ASCII data, consider 
holding off for a quite a while.  But I am not the right person to ask 
-- someone has to try the new versions to find and debug the problems ....

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley using stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford