Already we have seen several questioners confused by the new features of 2.1.0. Resources which may help: - Read the R-admin manual. It has changed a lot, and covers setting up locales and languages as well as changes to the configure options. Everyone should read chapter 6 (Internationalization), and all those building from source on Unix should read Appendices A and B. - The R-data manual has examples of reading files in different encodings. Users of UTF-8 locales (MacOS X and most modern Linuxen) will need to take care with `legacy' files. - The long list of new topics in the NEWS file: in almost all cases there are further details on the help pages. - For package maintainers, `Writing R Extensions' of course. There will (I am told) be some expository articles in the 2005-1 issue of R-News. I've put one on the changes to update.packages() and friends up (temporarily) at http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/R/Packages210.pdf
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595