From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Mon Jun 29 11:34:38 2009
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:34:38 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Rd] Removing support for --without-iconv
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0906291026100.14580@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>

We made support for a sufficiently general iconv 'essential' in R 
2.5.0 and have been giving configure warnings on --without-iconv ever 
since.  We originally announced that --without-iconv would be 
available in 2.5.x only.

The delay in making iconv compulsory was down to problems with 
installing GNU iconv from public repositories on AIX and 64-bit 
Solaris, but both are now resolved (see the latest R-admin manual, in 
R-patched or R-devel).

So we now propose to make iconv compulsory as from R 2.10.0.  If 
anyone has a compelling reason why this would cause difficulties, 
please post a deatialed case during the next week.

-- 
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



[Rd] Removing support for --without-iconv
Prof Brian Ripley