change in read.spss, package foreign?

On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, Heinz Tuechler wrote:

Dear Martin,
Thank you for your answer. As I said, I appreciate this change. The
documentation does not explain precisely, how variables with labels are
treated now. It only tells "If SPSS value labels are converted to factors
the underlying numerical codes will not in general be the same as the SPSS
numerical values, since the numerical codes in R are always 1,2,3,...".
Will now the created factor levels in any case be ordered according to the
order of the original numerical codes in SPSS?

We don't know. We think so, based on a reasonable amount of 
experimentation, but the file format isn't documented.  We do know that 
the numerical codes R uses will always be 1,2,3,... so that there is no 
hope for having the same codes as SPSS unless the SPSS codes were also 
1,2,3...

In general I wonder, how I could get to know such critical changes before I
update a package instead of finding it out by chance. Is there a place,
where a responsible R-user should look, when updating the program?

Many packages have a NEWS or ChangeLog file describing changes.  You would 
typically have to look at the source package to find them, since by Unix 
tradition they are usually in the top-level directory and so are not 
included in the binary build.

The foreign package is on svn.r-project.org, so you can see its Changelog 
there. There have been suggestions to extract these files and put them in 
the CRAN listing, but one obstacle is the lack of standardisation.

	-thomas