R mailing lists archive

This is an archive of the four main R mailing lists, R-announce, R-packages, R-help and R-devel, as well as the New Zealand and Australian list R-downunder. The archive is automatically updated multiple times a day, so anything posted to the list should be in the archive within about 2 hours. You can tell the last time the archive was updated by checking the date on one of the index files, by following the links for the latest section of the R-help archive. Feel free to contact me if there are problems with the archive.

Posters should be aware that the R lists are public discussion lists and anything you post will be archived and accessible via several websites for many years. Due to the volume of posts to the lists (particularly R-help), I regret that I am unable to assist with requests to remove or anonymise particular emails.

The archive is split up by date (see below for details)

Latest R-help R-devel R-announce R-packages R-downunder

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Be aware that the search will always return the index pages if you pick words that appear in the subject lines of message.

What is R?

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.

R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.

One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.

R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs out of the box on a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux). It also compiles and runs on Windows 9x/NT/2000 and MacOS.

For more information on R, see the R homepage (from which this description was taken), and the Frequently Asked Questions list for R.

Thanks to Martin Maechler, there are four mailing lists devoted to R:

r-announce: This list is for announcements about the development of R and the availability of new code. [archive sections]
To subscribe to the R-announce mailing list, send mail to r-announce-request@stat.math.ethz.ch with subscribe in the messge body (not in the subject line!). Information about the list can be obtained by sending an email with info as its contents (again, in the message body, not the subject line!) to the same address.
r-help: The `main' R mailing list, for announcements about the development of R and the availability of new code, questions and answers about problems and solutions using R, enhancements and patches to the source code and documentation of R, comparison and compatibility with S and S-plus, and for the posting of nice examples and, benchmarks. [archive sections]
To subscribe to the R-help mailing list, send mail to r-help-request@stat.math.ethz.ch with subscribe in the messge body (not in the subject line!). Information about the list can be obtained by sending an email with info as its contents (again, in the message body, not the subject line!) to the same address.
r-packages: This list is for announcements about packages Note that the list is moderated. However, CRAN package authors (and others, similarly qualified) can freely post.
As with R-announce, all messages to R-packages are automatically forwarded to the main R-help mailing list; we still recommend to subscribe to R-packages if you read R-help only in digest form.
Use the web interface for information, subscription, archives, etc.
r-devel: This list is for discussions about the future of R and pre-testing of new versions. It is meant for those who maintain an active position in the development of R.[archive sections]
Subscribe the the r-devel list by suitably permuting the request address.
r-downunder: This is a special-interest list for R users in Australia, New Zealand and nearby places. Subscription and other information is available at the R-downunder list information page.