Release haven 2.5.0

[gorcha]

Prepare for release:

• [x] git pull
• [x] Check current CRAN check results
• [x] Polish NEWS
• [x] devtools::build_readme()
• [x] urlchecker::url_check()
• [x] devtools::check(remote = TRUE, manual = TRUE)
• [x] devtools::check_win_devel()
• [x] rhub::check_for_cran()
• [x] rhub::check(platform = 'ubuntu-rchk')
• [x] rhub::check_with_sanitizers()
• [x] revdepcheck::cloud_check()
• [x] Update cran-comments.md
• [x] git push
• [x] Draft blog post — https://github.com/tidyverse/tidyverse.org/pull/575
• [x] Slack link to draft blog in #open-source-comms

Submit to CRAN:

• [x] usethis::use_version('minor')
• [x] devtools::submit_cran()
• [x] Approve email

Wait for CRAN...

• [x] Accepted :tada:
• [x] git push
• [x] usethis::use_github_release()
• [x] usethis::use_dev_version()
• [x] git push
• [x] Finish blog post
• [x] Tweet
• [x] Add link to blog post in pkgdown news menu

[gorcha]

Over to you, @hadley

[hadley]

@gorcha revdepchecks look good. Would you mind suggesting a few new features that I should highlight in the blog post? I normally just skim the NEWS.md looking for the bullets that I think are likely to affect a decent number of people.

[gorcha]

Sure!

In general this release is focused on improvements and bug fixes for file writing.

Noteworthy new features are:

• Support for writing StrL variables. With the addition of StrL support it's now possible to write Stata files with character variables longer than 2045 characters, which was a hard upper limit.
• Support for setting custom variable widths.
• With the addition of custom variable width support and some XPT writing related bug fixes it is now possible to create FDA compliant SAS transport files using haven.

[hadley]

Do I remember correctly that the support for strL also considerably decreases file sizes?

[gorcha]

It can do in some cases with smaller character vectors but not universally (only noticeably where there's a lot of duplication). By far the biggest impact of adding strL support is that we can now write strings with more than 2045 characters.

One change that has a big Stata file size improvement is setting the minimum string variable width to 1 instead of 0 - ReadStat used str2045 for 0 width string variables previously, but these now use str1. Since str# uses a fixed amount of bytes per record this saves a huge amount of space in files with blank string variables.

[hadley]

Ah got it, thanks!