r-cran-rserve 1.7-3-3build2 / usr / lib / R / site-library / Rserve / NEWS

 NEWS/Changelog for Rserve
---------------------------

1.7-3	2013-08-21
    o	the handling of server configuration modes has been
	inconsistent for some combinations (mostly affected were
	combinations involving WebSockets upgrade and OC mode on
	HTTP/WS servers). Also the websockets.qap.oc configuration
	option has been misspelled.

    o	HTTPS->WSS upgrade is now supported

    o	mkdist -i installs the built package, use -c for check

    o	Windows compatibility has been restored thanks to
	David Champagne from Revolution Analytics


1.7-2	2013-08-12
    o	when uid/gid is changed, create a new tempdir() and set its
	permissions as well as the wokring directory's owner to match.

    o	bugfix: if the first command is not any of the eval family
	the Rserve may respond with an additional, spurious error
	response

    o	deamonized server would record incorrect pid when pid.file
	is used (i#5). The pid is now removed on clean sutdown.

    o	added support for keep.alive configuration option - it is
	global to all servers and if enabled the client sockets are
	instructed to keep the connection alive by periodic messages.


1.7-1	2013-07-02
    o	remove a spurious character that prevented compilation on Suns

    o	add OPENSSL_INCLUDES precious variable that can be used to
	point to non-standard location of OpenSSL headers

    o	check the usability of OpenSSL headers before enabling TLS
	support

    o	added the choice of GPLv2 or GPLv2 with OpenSSL linking exception


1.7-0

   ***	---- HEADLINE NEWS ----
   ***	new protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, WebSockets and TLS/QAP
   ***	added protocol switching (from QAP to TLS/QAP) via CMD_switch
   ***	The R client was moved to RSclient package
   ***	New in-session server support with run.Rserve()
   ***	Out-of-band messages via self.oobSend()
   ***  user-based uid/gid switch, MD5/SHA1 stored passwords
   ***  preliminary IPv6 support; RSA secure authentication
   ***  .Rserve.done global env hook for optiopnal cleanup
   ***  auth.function setting to allow custom authentication
   ***  Object-capability mode for hardened, secure services
   ***	---- END - see below for details ----

    o	This is the first release in the new 1.x Rserve series. Many
	of the Rserve internals have been re-written or cleaned
	up. The original protocol remains the same (so all clients
	that worked with Rserve 0.6 will continue to work), but the
	suite of available protocols has been extended (see below).

    o	added support for multiple protocols in Rserve:

        ** QAP **
	this is the original Rserve protocol used in Rserve 0.x
	series. It works over TCP/IP and unix sockets. It is
	enabled by default and can be disabled using
	"qap disable" configuration directive.

	** HTTP **
	this is very similar to the built-in R http server except that
	on unix it forks on connection so it allows parallel separate,
	persistent connections. It requires a worker function
	.http.request to be defined in the session which will handle
	incoming requests. This allows the use of facilities like
	FastRWeb without an external webserver. This protocol is
	disabled by default and can be enabled by setting "http.port"
	configuration directive to the desired port to listen to.
	(Also see TLS support below for https server).

	The http.raw.body configuration option (default is false which
	results in the same behavior as Rhttpd) can be used to force
	passing body in raw form to the handler (useful for the
	FastRWeb handler which does its own parsing).

	** WebSockets **
	this protocol is used by HTML5 web browsers for direct access
	to R with a persistent connection. This allows implementation
	of websites that have a dedicated R session (and could be used
	as an R console). There are two subprotocols supported by
	Rserve:

	  -- WebSocket(*, "QAP") --
	  this is a tunnel for the original QAP protocol through
	  WebSockets. It requires a browser capable of binary
	  WebSockets protocol (version 01 or higher). It allows very
	  efficient data transfer, typically by loading ArrayBuffers
	  directly into GPU or CPU.
	  It is disabled by default and can be enabled using
	  "websockets.qap enable" configuration directive.
	  (If no subprotocol is specified, QAP is assumed)

	  -- WebSocket(*, "text") --
	  this is a very simplistic protocol using plain text frames
	  to send input to R and output from R directly as text. It
	  acts essentially as an R console. This protocol works with
	  any WebSockets implementation including version hybi-00 and
	  hixie-75/76
	  It is disabled by default and can be enabled using
	  "websockets.text enable" configuration directive.

	  NOTE: The textual WebSockets protocol does NOT provide any
	  authentication mechanism, so use with extreme care as you
	  are essentially giving any user with a web browser access to
	  R and thus to the shell.
	  
	In addition to enabling each or both subprotocols, the port on
	which the WebSockets server should listen must be specified in
	the configuration using "websockets.port" directive, for
	example "websockets.port 8080". Alternatively, the HTTP server
	can be enabled to allow connection upgrade to WebSockets on
	the same port with "http.upgrade.websockets enable"

	NOTE: remember that the default in Rserve is to disallow
	remote connections, so you may need to use "remote enable" in
	order to use WebSockets or HTTP in practice, since the point
	is to serve remote machines. Typically, if both QAP and either
	HTTP or WebSockets are used, it is recommended to use QAP on a
	local unix socket for better access control.

    o	Rserve now supports SSL/TLS connections on QAP, HTTP and WS
	protocols. The TLS key/CA entries are common for all
	protocols. The relevant new configuration directives are:

	  tls.key <private key PEM file>
	  tls.cert <server certificate PEM file>
	  tls.ca <CA PEM file issuing the above certificate>

	SSL/TLS can be used in several ways: with separate port for
	TLS connections or by switching protocol form a regular QAP
	connection using CMD_switch with "TLS" as argument. The latter
	can be enabled using

	  switch.qap.tls enable

	Enabled switching is advertized by Rserve with the presence
	of a "TLS" entry in the ID string. Keys and other TLS entries
	must be initialized in order for TLS to be enabled.

	Dedicated TLS servers can be enabled by specifying the port
	for the corresponding protocol:

 	  qap.tls.port <port>        - for Rserve/QAP
	  http.tls.port <port>       - for HTTPS
	  websockets.tls.port <port> - for WebSockets

	(there are synonyms "https.port" for "http.tls.port" and
	 "tls.port" for "qap.tls.port", however, the *.tls.port
	 versions are preferred for clarity)

	The use of TLS protocols is encouraged where sensitive data
	is transmitted or when requiring secure authentication. For
	QAP protocol, using TCL/QAP with SHA1 passwords (also new, see
	below) is the currently recommended way where authorization is
	required. The only drawback is increased CPU utilization
	during transfers casued by the encryption and the fact that
	TLS-enabled clients must be used. See also RSA secure
	authentication (CMD_keyReq + CMD_secLogin) for a different
	method if only the authentication step is to be encrypted.

	When enabling TLS tls.key and tls.cert are mandatory, tls.ca
	is optional to establish CA chain of trust (whether this is
	needed depends on the client and the certificate). To generate
	a key and self-signed certificate, you can use something like
	
	  openssl genrsa -out server.key 2048
	  openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
	  openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr \
                  -signkey server.key -out server.crt

	NOTE: TLS services are started **in addition** to any other
	servers, i.e., if you want to enable TLS/QAP only, you have to
	set tls.qap.port but also add "qap disable" to disable the
	plain Rserve access.

    o	QAP servers (classic Rserve QAP, QAP/TLS and WebSocket/QAP)
	support object-capability (OC) mode in which all Rserve
	commands are disabled except for CMD_OCcall. All messages
	including the initial handshake are always QAP and the initial
	message defines capabilities (here opaque references to
	closures) that can be called. This mode can be enabled using

	  qap.oc enable            ## for Rserve QAP and QAP/TLS
	  websockets.qap.oc enable ## for WebSockets/QAP
	
	In this mode the configuration *must* define a function
	oc.init (typically using eval or source configuration
	directives) which has to supply OC references that can be used
	in calls. If the evaluation of oc.init() fails, the connection
	is closed immediately. The use of invalid OC references or any
	other commands other than CMD_OCcall results in immediate
	connection termination. This allows creation of hardened,
	secure services that can disallow arbitrary code execution.

	NOTE: this mode is inherenty incompatible with all classic
	Rserve clients. The first four bytes of the initial packet are
	"RsOC" instead of "Rsrv"

    o	Rserve can now be started from within an existing R session
	using run.Rserve() command. This allows the user to prepare a
	session "by hand", run Rserve from within that session and go
	back to the session (by shutting down the server or sending an
	interrupt). This allows the use of Rserve even without the
	presence of libR.

    o	Rserve now supports out-of-band (OOB) messages. Those can be
	sent using the self.oobSend() [one-way] and self.oobMessage()
	[roundtrip] functions from within code that is evaluated in
	Rserve child instances. OOB messages are not used by Rserve
	itself but offer asynchronous notification to clients that
	support it (one typical use are WS-QAP1 tunnels	to web
	browsers that allow status updates as R code is evaluated).

    o	Rserve accepts additional command line arguments:
	--RS-source <file>   (same as "source <file>" in cfg file)
	--RS-enable-remote   (same as "remote enable" in cfg file)
	--RS-enable-control  (same as "control enable" in cfg file)

    o	The Rserve package no longer includes the R client. It has
	been moved to a separate package "RSclient" so that it can be
	used on machines separate from the server.

    o	There was a bug in QAP storage estimation affecting pairlists,
	possibly resulting in buffer overflows. This should be fixed
	and an error message will be printed when such overflows are
	detected in the future (which hopefully won't happen).

    o	Bugfix: command line parsing would skip over some arguments

    o	Passwords file can contain MD5 or SHA1 hash of a password
	instead of the plaintext password for non-crypt
	authentication. In that case the hash must be lowercase	hex
	representation with preceding $ sign, so for example user
	"foo" with password "bar" would have an entry
	foo $62cdb7020ff920e5aa642c3d4066950dd1f01f4d
	You can use
	  echo -n 'password' | openssl sha1
  	to obtain the SHA1 hash of a password (openssl md5 for MD5
	hash - MD5 is probably more common but less secure than
	SHA1). This feature makes sure that passwords are not stored
	in plain text and thus are safe from local attacks.

    o	Rserve now has the ability to change uid/gid according to the
	user that has been authenticated. The following settings
	concern this feature (unix-only):

	   auto.uid {enable|disable} [disable]
	   auto.gid {enable}disable} [disable]
	   default.uid <uid> [none]
	   default.gid <gid> [none]

	The auto.uid/gid directives enable setuid/setgid based on
	user's uid/gid. In case no uid/gid is specified with the
	username, the default.uid/gid settings will be used. If there
	is no uid/gid in the username and no defaults are specified,
	the user's authentication will fail. User's uid/gid can be
	specified in the passwords file by appending /uid,gid to the
	username. If gid is not specified, uid will be used for both
	uid and gid. So for example user "foo" (from the above MD5
	example) with uid=501 would have an entry on the passwords
	file:

	   foo/501 $37b51d194a7513e45b56f6524f2d51f2

	For this to work, Rserve must be started as root. However,
	with auto.uid enabled it is safe to do so since Rserve will
	prevent any R access until authenticated. You should, however,
	use a client capable of secure RSA authentication or use secure
	connection such as QAP/TLS as to not send password in
	cleartext over the wire.

    o	Rserve can now be run in a mode where each connection has a
	different uid and/or gid such that separate client instances
	are isolated. This allows more restricted setup in cases where
	instances may not be trusted and need to be sandboxed. The
	following configuration directives are associated with this
	functionality:

	   random.uid {enable|disable} [disable]
	   random.gui {enable|disable} [disable]
	   random.uid.range {<from>..<to>} [32768..65540]

	If random.uid is enabled and random.gid disable then only the
	uid of the process is changed. If both are enabled then the
	gid is set to match the value of the uid. random.gid cannot be
	enabled without random.uid.

	To support sandboxing, the permissions on the working
	directory can be specified using

	   workdir.mode <mode>

    o	If any kind of client-process uid switching is enabled in the
	configuration, the permissions on the working directory will
	match the uid of the process. Also the working directories are
	now named by the process ID to facilitate cleanup.

    o	Rserve now supports secure authentication even outside of
	SSL/TLS. There are two new commands that can be used by the
	client:
	
	CMD_keyReq   - requests an authentication key from the server
	               that will be used to perform a secure
	               login. The kind of the requested key is
	               specified as a parameter. Currently, only
	               "rsa-authkey" is supported which returns server
	               authentication key (authkey) and a RSA public
	               key which must be used to encode the authkey
	               and the authentication information (see below).
		       The RSA key can be compared on the client side
	               to ensure the authenticity of the server.

	CMD_secLogin - secure login. It consists of an encrypted data
	               stream that will authenticate the user. In the
	               case of the "rsa-authkey" method, the stream
	               consists of the authkey and the login +
	               password, all of which must be encrypted using
	               server's RSA key.

	The RSA key on the server (Rserve) side is specified using

	   rsa.key <RSA private key file>

	configuration file directive. The file is expected to be in
	PEM format. You can generate such file, e.g., with:

	   openssl genrsa -out server.key 4096

	where 4096 is the key size in bits. A public key can be
	extracted from the private key using

	   openssl rsa -pubout -in server.key -out server_pub.key

	The clients can pre-share the public key by other means to
	compare it to the key received from the server as to verify
	its authenticity. This will prevent them from sending the
	authentication information to rogue servers.

	NOTE: if the rsa.key directive is missing, Rserve will
	generate a key on the fly when asked for RSA authentication -
	although this allows encrypted transmission and thus is safe
	from sniffing, it is not safe from man-in-the-middle attacks
	where a rogue server intercepts the request and sends its own
	public key. Therefore the use of the rsa.key directive is
	highly recommended.

	The RSA authentication enables the client to a) check the
	authenticity of the server (by comparing the RSA public key)
	and b) send authentication information encrypted. This method
	is highly recommended in cases where a full TLS/SSL encryption
	of the entire connection would be too expensive (i.e. in cases
	where the data is large and the security of the transported
	data is not crucial).

    o	Rserve has a preliminary IPv6 support. Rserve must be
    	installed with --enable-ipv6 configure flag to enable it in
	the Rserve build. In order to start all servers on IPv6 add

	   ipv6 enable

	to the configuration file. The option is global, i.e. once
	enabled it applies to all servers that support it. Note that
	not all features work with IPv6 yet - detaching sessions
	(they will use IPv4 for re-attach) and remote client filtering
	only work with IPv4 at this point.

    o	Rserve now binds only to the loopback interface in
	"remote disable" mode. This is safer and prevents remote DoS
	attacks. Previously, Rserve would bind on all interfaces and
	check the peer IP address. If desired, you can replicate the
	old behavior by adding

	   remote enable
	   allow 127.0.0.1

	to the configuration (if you don't know the difference then
	you don't need this -- if you actually need this, then you
	probably want to add more "allow" entries for the machine's
	other interfaces as well).

    o	If a function .Rserve.done() is defined in the global
	environment, it will be run after a clean connection
	shutdown. This allows custom code to be run when a client
	connection is closed.

    o	If a function .Rserve.served() is defined in the global
	environment of the server, it will be run after a client
	connection has been served. For forked servers this is just
	after the fork(), for co-operative servers this is after the
	client conenction has been closed. It is guaranteed that no
	other client is served before the call so it can be used to
	manage resources that are unsafe to share with forked
	processes (e.g. sockets etc.).

    o	The server and client process can be tagged with extra
	information in argv[0] so it is possible to distinguish the
	server and children. This behavior can be enabled using

	    tag.argv enable

	Note, however, that this not always possible and it will have
	impact on programs that use argv[0] such as killall.

    o	Added configuration option pid.file and command-line option
	--RS-pidfile which instructs Rserve to write its process id
	(pid) into that file at startup.

    o	Added configuration directives http.user, https.user and
	websockets.user which take a username and perform
	setuid/setgid/initgroups immediately after forking.
	This minimizes the amount of code that is run with
	elevated privileges in cases where user switching is desired.

    o	Added configuration directive

	   daemon disable

	which can be used to prevent Rserve from daemonizing. It has
	effect only in builds of Rserve that support daemonization.
	Note that -DNODAEMON build flag disables daemonization
	entirely and can be used in any Rserve version.

    o	All commands based on eval now also accept DT_SEXP in addition
	to DT_STRING. In such case the parse step is skipped and the
	expression is evaluated directly. The intended use of this
	functionality is to evaluate language constructs and thus
	allow calls with both reference and inlined arguments.

    o	QAP decoding is slightly more efficient and avoids protection
	cascades. QAP_decode() has now only one argument and it	is
	guaranteed to not increase the protection stack when returning
	(which implies that it is the responsibility of the caller to
	protect the result if needed).

    o	Both QAP encoding and decoding now use native copy operations
	on little-endian machines which can increase the speed
	considerably when the compiler cannot do this optimization
	on its own (most commoly used compilers don't).

    o	Assigning logical NAs now uses the proper NA_LOGICAL value
	that is also recognized by R. (PR#276)

    o	Forked child processes will now close all server sockets so
	that any server can be restarted without closing existing
	children.

    o	Signal handling has been streamlined: the server process
	captures HUP, TERM and INT which will lead to clean
	shutdown. Child processes restore signal handlers back to R so
	that regular R signal handling rules apply. Note that
	interrupt during eval will result in RESP_ERR with code 127
	even if try() is used.


--- In order to support new ideas a major re-organization of Rserve ---
--- has been started - almost 10 years after the first release.     ---
--- It is time to look ahead again with a new major version. The    ---
--- protocol will remain compatible so 1.x series can be used to    ---
--- replace the previous 0.x series                                 ---


0.6-8	2012-02-20
    o	added RSserverEval() and RSserverSource() control commands
	in the R client as well as ctrl parameter to RSshutdown().

    o	added new facility that allows R scripts running in Rserve to
	issue control commands if allowed. This feature must be
	enabled in the Rserve configuration file using

	r-control enable

	This will make self.ctrlEval() and self.ctrlSource() functions
	available to code that is running within the Rserve
	instance. It is also possible to use this feature without
	explicitly loading the Rserve package via
	.Call("Rserve_ctrlEval", paste(text, collapse='\n'))
	.Call("Rserve_ctrlSource", as.character(file))
	although this may change in the future.

0.6-7	2012-01-17
    o   fix processing of login information
    	**IMPORTANT**: this fixes a serious security hole in the 
	remote login mechanism! If you rely on authentication,
	please make sure you update your Rserve immediately!
	(Thanks to Daniel Faber for reporting)

    o	add a namespace to make R 2.14+ happy

    o	work around broken readBin() in R 2.14.0 that errors
	on unsigned integers (affects R client only)

0.6-6	2011-12-10
    o	fix a bug that can cause heap corruption due to incorrect
	addressing in padding of symbols. Unless extremely long symbol
	names are used it is unlikely to have a real effect in
	practice, but in theory it could be used to zero targetted
	parts of the heap. Thanks to Ralph Heinkel for reporting.

    o	fix Rserve() call on Windows with quote=FALSE and more than
	one argument.

    o	clarify that sisocks.h is under LGPL 2.1 as well as the other
	headers used by clients.

    o	add support for plain S4 objects (S4SEXP) in assignments
	(Note: derived S4 objects - those using other native SEXP type
	as a base - cannot be supported properly, becasue there is no
	way to distinguish them from S3 objects!)

    o	Unsupported types in CMD_assign will no longer crash R.
	The resulting object is always NULL and an error is printed on
	the R side.


0.6-5	2011-06-21
    o	use new install.libs.R custom installation script in R 2.13.1
	to install binaries

    o	install clients by default on Windows as well

    o	multi-arch binaries are no longer installed with the arch suffix
	in the package root. The canonical place is libs$(R_ARCH) instead.
	For now Rserve.exe/Rserve_d.exe are still installed in the root
	but they will be also removed in the future as they are not
	multi-arch safe.


0.6-4	2011-05-19
    o	make all buffers capable of using 64-bit sizes. This means
	that clients can use more that 4Gb of data on 64-bit platforms
	when communicating with Rserve, provided the buffer limits are
	either disabled or configured to be high enough. Note that this
	does not change	the limitations in R with respect to vector
	lengths so you still can only use up to 2^31-1 elements.
   
    o	bug fix: contrary to the documentation scalar logicals were sent
	in the old XT_BOOL format instead of XT_ARRAY_BOOL

    o	work around several issues introduced in R 2.13.0 for Windows

	Rserve() now also allows arguments to be passed to system() for
	more fine-grained control of the environment, mostly to work
	around bugs and incompatible changes to system() on Windows
	in R 2.13.0 (commonly used options are invisible=FALSE to get
	back to a more reasonable pre-2.13.0 behavior and wait=TRUE if
	using R 2.13.0 that has broken wait=FALSE support).

    o	In Rserve() startup wrapper, args are now quoted automatically
	if quote=TRUE is set. For backward compatilility args are not
	quoted by default if they consist of just one string.


0.6-3	2011-01-17
    o	bug fix: the child process could get stuck in the server loop
	after some abnormal return from the child connection code
	Thanks to David Richardson for reporting.

    o	set R_ARCH automatically on Windows if a multi-arch R is
	detected (such as CRAN binaries since R 2.12.0)

    o	add R_ARCH support in Rserve() on Windows to locate the
	proper binary

    o	bug fix: C++ client did not handle new-style lists (introduced
	in Rserve 0.5) properly. Thanks to Carl Martin Grewe for
	reporting.


0.6-2	2010-09-02
    o	add support for NAs in character vectors by using a special
	"\xff" string. Any string beginning with '\xff' is
	prepended by additional '\xff' to remove ambiuguity and clients
	should remove leading '\xff' accordingly.
	(Note that UTF-8 encoded strings never contain '\xff' so
	in most uses it never occurs).

	The Java client has been updated accordingly and represents
	NA strings with null.

    o	add a new config file option "interactive" that allows to run
	Rserve in interactive or non-interactive mode across platforms.
	Previously Windows ran in non-interactive mode and unix in
	interactive mode. Non-interactive mode is useful if you want
	to prevent R from soliciting user input, but it requires error
	option to be set if you don't want to quit R on all errors
	(i.e., something like options(error=function() NULL) will do)

	Note: on unix the interactivity flag can only be set *after* R
	initialization (due to limitation in R) so you still may have
	to pass flags like --no-save in order to appease R.

    o	more Windows fixes - Rserve uses R's own initialization in
	recent R versions. This also fixes issues with Win64 and more
	recent toolchains.
	Note that both Widnows and unix now behave consistently with
	respect to interactive mode - the default is now interactive
	for both platforms but can be changed in the config file.


0.6-1	2010-05-24
    o	add a safety margin to the send buffer to avoid crashes when
	size estimates are off (e.g., due to re-coding)

    o	added a very primitive PHP client

    o	Win64 fixes by Brian Ripley

    o	added new configuration options:
	su {now|server|client} - switches user either immediately
	as the config file is loaded ("now", default and always the
	behavior of Rserve before 0.6-1), when the server is ready
	("server") or when a client is spawned ("client"). The
	latter is useful to restrict clients from sending signals
	to the server process.

	uid, gid config options are interpreted accordingly to
	the su value.

	cachepwd - {no|yes|indefinitely} - allows Rserve to cache
	the password file. "no" = read it at each authorization
	(default and behavior before 0.6-1), "yes" = read it when
	a client is spawned before su, "indefinitely" = read it
	just after the config file (most efficient but changes
	are only active after re-start). "yes" has only effect
	in unix and can be used to restrict permissions on the
	password file such that client code has no access to it
	(do does "indefinitely" but can be used anywhere).


0.6-0	2009-10-27
    o	added support for control commands CMD_ctrlEval,
	CMD_ctrlSource and CMD_ctrlShutdown. Those commands provide
	control over the server process. The side-efect of eval and
	source are then available to all future connections.

	Control commands are only available if they are enabled, e.g.,
	with the config file entry "control enable". In addition if
	authorization is required or the passwords file is set only
	designated users will have control access (see next point).

	Note that enabling control commands will make Rserve use at
	least one file descriptor per active child process, so you may
	want to adjust the maximum number of file descriptor in your
	system if you expect hundreds of concurrent clients.

    o	The passwords file format has been enhanced to give
	finer-granularity control over the user authorization.

	Only users with "@" prefix can issue control commands. The
	prefix is not part of the user name for authentication
	purposes.

	In addition, if the password file contains an entry
	starting with "*" it will be interpreted as blank
	authorization, i.e. any username/pwd will authenticate. This
	may be useful in conjunction with control prefix, e.g., the
	following file would give blank authorization to all users but
	only the user "joe" will be able to use control commands:

	@joe foobar
	*

    o	Windows build cleanup (thanks to Brian Ripley)

    o	fixed decoding of XT_RAW (it advanced too far), this affected
	the use of XT_RAW as non-last element only (thanks to Saptarshi
	Guha for reporting)

    o	don't advertize ARuc if not supported (this bug only affected
	systems without crypt support with plaintext enabled and
	required authorization)

    o	add assign support for logical vectors


0.5-3	2009-01-25
    o	fix SET_VECTOR_ELT/SET_STRING_ELT mismatches

    o	set object flag when decoding objects that have
	a "class" attribute (fixes issues with S3 objects that
	were passed from the client to the server).

    o	set S4 bit for pure S4 objects (S4SEXP). No other S4
	objects are supported because there is no way to tell
	that an assembled object is really an S4 object

    o	added string encoding support (where R supports it)
	The string encoding can be set in the configuration file
	(directive "encoding"), on the command line with --RS-encoding
	or within a session by the client command CMD_setEncoding.

	This means that strings are converted to the given encoding
	before being sent to the client and also all strings from the
	client are assumed to come from the given encoding.
	(Previously the strings were always passed as-is with no
	conversion). The currently supported encodings are "native"
	(same as the server session locale), "utf8" and	"latin1". The
	server default is currently "native" for compatibility with
	previous versions (but may change to "utf8" in the future, so
	explicit use of encoding in the config file is advised).

	If a server is used mainly by Java clients, it is advisable to
	set the server encoding to "utf8" since that it the only
	encoding supported by Java clients.

	For efficieny it is still advisable to run Rserve in the same
	locale as the majority of clients to minimize the necessary
	conversions. With diverse clients UTF-8 is the most versatile
	encoding for the server to run in while it can still serve
	latin1 clients as well.


0.5-2	2008-10-17
    o	fix a bug in CMD_readFile and CMD_setBufferSize that
	resulted in invalid buffer sizes (one of the ways to
	trigger the bug was to attempt to read a small number of
	bytes with readFile). Thanks to H. Rehauer for reporting.

    o	ignore attributes if they are not in a LISTSXP - there seem
	to be other uses of the ATTRIB entry in conjunction with
	character hashes in recent R versions. (BR #76)

    o	adapt C++ client to changes in 0.5 (at least to the point
	where the demo1 code works)

    o	add support for XT_VECTOR_EXP in assignments

    o	improve protection for vectors

    o	report "remote" setting in --RS-settings

    o	updates in the REngine Java client, added documentation


0.5-1	2008-07-22
    o	fix build issue with R 2.7.x on Windows

    o	mergefat now works properly and uses cp if there is no lipo
	(this fixes multi-arch issues on Mac OS X and makes sure that
	Rserve/Rserve.dbg are installed even on non-Mac systems)


0.5-0	2008-07-21
    o	added CMD_serEval and CMD_serAssign which are highly efficient
	when talking to R clients as they don't need any intermediate
	buffer. The corresponding R client functions RSeval and
	RSassign have been re-written to use this new API.

    o	deprecate scalar types in the protocol

    o	add more efficient storage for dotted-pair lists
	and symbol names

    o	add support for complex numbers

    o	new Java client: REngine
	it is more flexible than JRclient and it can be used with
	other Java/R engines such as JRI. Also it has a much more
	clean API and better exeption handling.
	- allow NaNs to be passed in raw form to R, i.e. double
	  NAs can be created using
	  Double.longBitsToDouble(0x7ff00000000007a2L)
	  (nice methods for this should follow)

    o	C++ client was moved to src/client/cxx

JRclient:
    o	change the representation of lists to generic
	named vectors (class RList)

    o	change the ways attributes are accessed


0.4-7	2007-01-14
    o	relax DLL versions checking on Windows

    o	added more sophisticated implementation of RSassign
	in R client to support larger data. Nevertheless, due to
	limitations in R, objects must be serializable to
	less than 8MB to be assignable via RSassign.

    o	added more robust error handling in the R client

    o	fixed compilation on systems with custom include dir
	(such as Debian)

    o	JRclient is now part of the Rserve package.
	See clients.txt for details.
	It is not compiled by default (but installed when
	--with-client is specified), because we cannot assume the
	existence of a Java compiler.


0.4-6	2006-11-30
    o	fixed bug in RSeval when handling large objects

    o	minor fix in RSassign

    o	add an endianness hack for Windows in case config.h is not
	included properly


0.4-5	2006-11-29
    o	added --with-server option (by default enabled). When disabled,
	the server itself is not built. When enabled, R must provide R
	shared library, i.e. it must have been compiled with
	--enable-R-shlib.

    o	added --with-client option (by default disabled). When
	enabled, the C/C++ client is built and installed in the
	package. It will be copied in the "client" directory of the
	package and contains all files necessary for building a
	client application.

	This option has no effect on the R client which is always
	built and installed.

    o	Windows version of Rserve now builds and installs both debug
	(Rserve_d.exe) and regular (Rserve.exe) version of Rserve. In
	addition, the Rserve function can now be used to launch Rserve
	even on Windows.

    o	endianness detection now prefers information from the compiler
	macros thus allowing cross-compilation. Use -D_BIG_ENDIAN_ or
	-D_LITTLE_ENDIAN_ to override it if necessary.

    o	allows universal build on Mac OS X

    o	adapt to R_ParseVector interface change in R-devel


0.4-4	2006-11-15
    o	first release on CRAN

    o	added support for RAW type (both in and out)

    o	added rudimentary client support (thanks to David Reiss for
	his contributions) and documentation


Previous major releases:

0.4	2005-08-31
    *	added support for sessions

0.3	2003-10-07
    *	new format for boolean arrays
	last version: 0.3-18 (2005-08-28)

0.2	2003-08-21
    *	support for large objects

0.1 	2002-07-06
    *	first release