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A general description is here.
New function ‘extSoftVersion()’ to report on the versions of third-party software in use in this session. Currently reports versions of ‘zlib’, ‘bzlib’, the ‘liblzma’ from ‘xz’, PCRE, ICU and TRE.
‘configure’ options ‘--with-system-zlib’, ‘--with-system-bzlib’ and ‘--with-system-pcre’ are now the default. For the time being there is fallback to the versions included in the R sources if no system versions are found or (unlikely) if they are too old.
Linux users should check that the ‘-devel’ or ‘-dev’ versions of packages ‘zlib’, ‘bzip2’/‘libbz2’ and ‘pcre’ (or similar names) are installed.
The included version of ‘liblzma’ has been updated to ‘xz-utils’ 5.0.7 (minor bug fixes from 5.0.5).
Use of the included versions of ‘zlib’, ‘bzlib’, ‘xz’ and PCRE is deprecated: these are frozen and will eventually be removed.