Release notes
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS · a correctness and capacity release
5.0.1 fixes what 5.0.0 claimed and did not deliver, and substantially enlarges the installed environment. Every number below was measured on the built artifact.
| 5.0.0 | 5.0.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| R | 4.5.1 | 4.6.1 |
| Open MPI | 4.1.6 | 5.0.10 |
| Installed packages | 825 | 4,960 |
| Bioconductor | 69 | 2,192 |
| CRAN | 742 | 2,739 |
| Language analysis | — | 93 packages |
| Graphics devices | none | cairo, X11, Tcl/Tk, PNG, JPEG, TIFF |
| Java runtime | none | headless JRE |
R in 5.0.0 was configured without cairo, X11 or Tcl/Tk. R’s build does not fail when
those are missing — it drops the capability and exits successfully. The result
shipped: capabilities() reported png, jpeg,
tiff, cairo and tcltk all FALSE; base
png() could not open a device; tcltk installed but would not load;
and rgl, built without GL, wrote a valid blank image rather than
reporting an error.
All of these work in 5.0.1. Verified on the build: the skipped-capabilities list is empty,
and with no display attached png() writes a valid, non-blank image.
DISPLAY, R uses file devices exactly as before
and batch runs never touch X.The installed set grows from 825 packages to 4,960. Bioconductor goes from 69 to
2,192 — the genomics stack is now present rather than sampled:
DESeq2, edgeR, limma, clusterProfiler,
ComplexHeatmap, fgsea, scran, scater,
SingleCellExperiment, GenomicRanges, Rsamtools,
rtracklayer, biomaRt, org.Hs.eg.db and the rest of
the core infrastructure.
A 93-package language analysis suite is added: quanteda and its model, statistics and plotting companions, tidytext, text2vec, udpipe, spaCy and CoreNLP bindings, topic models (LDA, STM, seeded LDA, keyATM, BTM), embeddings (word2vec, fastText, LSA), sentiment, readability, language identification, entity recognition, and document ingestion for PDF, Word, RTF and EPUB.
The release gate loads every installed package in its own isolated process and fails the build if any will not load. Result on this build:
| Installed | Loadable | Failed |
|---|---|---|
| 4,960 | 4,960 | 0 |
That is the property the release is for. A package that installs cleanly and then errors on first use is the defect class 5.0.1 exists to remove, and the gate is what proves it is gone.
Some widely-known packages are deliberately absent. Each downloads a large payload from the
network the first time it is used, which fails on an instance intended to run offline, or
fails silently: torch, tensorflow, keras,
sparklyr, webshot, gifski.
h2o was fixed rather than removed: it ships a 265 MB Java archive and
5.0.0 carried no Java runtime at all, so the package was installed and unusable. 5.0.1
installs one.
Current-generation instance types are now available on the listing — t3, m5, c5 and r5 families. Previously the newest type offered was m4/c4/t2 era hardware.
4.4.4 remains on the listing and is unaffected.