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

[Prof Brian Ripley]

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).


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