R 4.3.2

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.