env & substitute2 are not available in 1.14.6

[Fred-Wu]

I am trying the new programming facilities in data.table, especially env and substitute2.

However, in the latest version of 1.14.6, those two seems not available.

unused argument (env = list(v = as.list(v)))

There are questions about using env with 1.14.3 on stackoverflow.

So were they removed from 1.14.6?

[ben-schwen]

This is a duplicate of #5369

env and substitute2 were originally planned for 1.14.3 which is similar to the current dev version. The last releases were hotfixes or attempts to counter current testing errors on CRAN.

Right now those features are only available in the current dev version. You can update to dev with data.table:::update.dev.pkg() (or with data.table:::update_dev_pkg() depending on which version you have installed).

[tdhock]

The way I think of it is that 1.14.6 is a "patch" release, just for keeping CRAN happy, but not introducing any major new features or bugfixes.
If I understand correctly the current versioning system is x.y.even for CRAN release and x.y.odd for github master, is that the only meaning of the version numbers or are there other meanings for the x and y currently?
Maybe it would be good if we had some versioning scheme that would indicate when we do a non-patch release?
For example we could increment the second number in the version? So the next major new feature/bugfix release to CRAN would be 1.15.2? And master could have version 1.15.1? (this may be able to avoid issues like this one, because patch releases would have smaller version numbers than the next feature/bugfix release)

[shrektan]

Any plan for the major release soon?

I believe fixes like #4803, which was merged into the master branch for 1.5 years, are not included in 1.14.6, yet. This has bitten me for years, and I'm unable to use the dev branch on the production machine, due to the IT policy of our company.

[tdhock]

We are working on a release. One of the things we need to do is minimize number of revdep check issues. If you have time to help, you could look at the list of open issues with revdep tag, https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Arevdep some of which need help (fixing dt issues such as #5133 ) or contacting revdep maintainers to ask for updates.