R 4.3.2 is now the default version on migale

CHANGES IN R 4.3.2

NEW FEATURES

• The default initialization of the "repos" option from the ‘repositories’ file at startup can be skipped by setting environment variable R_REPOSITORIES to NULL such that getOption("repos") is empty if not set elsewhere.

• qr.X() is now an implicit S4 generic in methods.

• iconv(to = "ASCII//TRANSLIT") is emulated using substitution on platforms which do not support it (notably Alpine Linux). This should give a human-readable conversion in ASCII on all platforms (rather than NA_character_).

• trans3d() gains options continuous and verbose addressing the problem of possible “wrap around” when projecting too long curves, as reported by Achim Zeileis in PR#18537.

• tools::showNonASCII() has been rewritten to work better on macOS 14 (which has a changed implementation of iconv()).

• tiff(type = "quartz") (the default on macOS) now warns if compression is specified: it continues to be ignored.

INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE

• There is some support for building with Intel's LLVM-based compilers on ‘⁠x86_64⁠’ Linux, such as (C) icx, (C++) ipcx and (Fortran) ifx from oneAPI 2023.x.y.

• There is support for using LLVM's flang-new as the Fortran compiler from LLVM 16.0.x (preferably 17.0.0 or later).

UTILITIES

• R CMD check reports the use of the Fortran 90 random number generator RANDOM_NUMBER() and the subroutines to initialize it.

  ‘Writing R Extensions’ has example code to use R's RNGs from Fortran.

BUG FIXES

• substr(x, n, L) <- cc now works (more) correctly for multibyte UTF-8 strings x when L > nchar(x), thanks to a report and patch by ‘Architect 95’.

• contrib.url(character()) now returns 0-length character() as documented, which also avoids spurious warnings from available.packages() et al. in the edge case of an empty vector of repository URLs.

• readChar(., 4e8) no longer fails, thanks to Kodi Arfer's report (PR#18557).

• lapply(<list>, as.data.frame) no longer warns falsely for some base vector components.

• Communication between parent and child processes in the multicore part of parallel could fail on platforms that do not support an arbitrarily large payload in system functions read()/write() on pipes (seen on macOS where a restriction to INT_MAX bytes is documented, without doing a partial read unlike Linux). The payload is now split into 1Gb chunks to avoid that problem. (PR#18571)

• qqplot(x,y, conf.level=.) gives better confidence bounds when length(x) != length(y), thanks to Alexander Ploner's report and patch proposal (PR#18557).

• norm(<0-length>, "2") now gives zero instead of an error, as all the other norm types, thanks to Mikael Jagan's PR#18542.

• Build-stage Rd macros ⁠\packageAuthor⁠ and ⁠\packageMaintainer⁠ now process ‘⁠Authors@R⁠’, fixing ‘⁠NA⁠’ results when the package ‘DESCRIPTION’ omits ‘⁠Author⁠’ and ‘⁠Maintainer⁠’ fields.

• Formatting and printing complex numbers could give things like ‘⁠0.1683-0i⁠’ because of rounding error: ‘⁠-0i⁠’ is now replaced by ‘⁠+0i⁠’.

• postscript() refused to accept a title comment containing the letter “W” (PR#18599).

• isoreg(c(1,Inf)) signals an error instead of segfaulting, fixing PR#18603.

• tiff(type = "Xlib") was only outputting the last page of multi-page plots.

• tools::latexToUtf8() again knows about ‘⁠\~{n}⁠’ and other letters with tilde, fixing a regression in R 4.3.0, and about ‘⁠\^{i}⁠’ as an alternative to ‘⁠\^{\i}⁠’ (similarly with other accents). Furthermore, LaTeX codes for accented I letters are now correctly converted, also fixing related mistakes in tools::encoded_text_to_latex().

• tar(*, tar = "internal") no longer creates out-of-spec tar files in the very rare case of user or group names longer than 32 bytes, fixing PR#17871 with thanks to Ivan Krylov.

• When using the “internal” timezone datetime code, adding a fraction of a second no longer adds one second, fixing PR#16856 from a patch by Ivan Krylov.

• tools::checkRd() no longer produces spurious notes about “unnecessary braces” from multi-line Rd results of ⁠\Sexpr⁠ macros.

BIOCONDUCTOR

Bioconductor version 3.18 (BiocManager 1.30.22), R 4.3.2 (2023-10-31)