From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Thu Mar 27 07:52:34 2003
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Mar 27 08:52:52 2003
Subject: [Rd] R-1.7.0 beta available
In-Reply-To: <3E827534.5020704@MedAnalytics.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0303270741320.27565-100000@gannet.stats>

On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Marc Schwartz wrote:

[...]

> Confirmed Roger's finding on RH 8.0, otherwise it compiles fine.

That comes from

cvs log ./share/perl/massage-Examples.pl
...
revision 1.15
date: 2003/03/26 20:12:56; 
Redefine T/F to something more useful than NULL.
...

which made it an error to get("F"), alhough that is a legitimate operation 
(it is assuming the value is FALSE that is the problem).  (get("T") would 
have failed too.)

Perhaps we need to delay putting out betas for a day after feature freeze 
to allow us to test the frozen version.


> As an aside, RH 9 to be called 'Shrike', (curiously skipping 8.1 due to 
> binary incompatibility issues) will be available on March 31 to paid RHN 
> subscribers. It will be available a week later to all folks.

Martyn Plummer has already mentioned this and that he will be testing it
before release.

> Folks doing development may want to be aware, if not already, of the 
> change in the threading approach used in RH 9 which will go to the 
> Native POSIX Threads Library. Some very brief information on the change 
> and possible application related problems is available here:
> 
> https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/phoebe-list/2003-March/004919.html
> 
> There is also a white paper here:
> 
> http://people.redhat.com/drepper/nptl-design.pdf
> 
> I raise this in case this might in any way affect anyone's development 
> considerations.

I don't think anything in Linux R uses threads, and we have problems with 
e.g. threaded ATLAS that suggest that threads are unsafe: see the R-admin 
manual.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@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] R-1.7.0 beta available
ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk