	CHANGES IN VERSION 0.30


SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES

   o	Added several plots to visualize several MCMC chains
   	('grid_trace2', 'grid_zoom', ...). 


NEW FEATURES

   o    New function 'germany.plot' to draw the landkreise.
   	('map.landkreis' is now obsolete).

   o	Switched from 'tim.colors' to 'colorRampPalette'
   	in 'germany.plot'.

   o 	Metadata in 'germany.info', polygon definitions in
   	'germany.poly' ('germany' kept for backwards 
	compatibility).


INTERNAL CHANGES

   o 	Switched to mercurial for maintaining the package.

   o    Updated ChangeLog file (hg log).

   o 	Increased dependency to >= R 2.15.

   o    Minor code and help cleanup.





	CHANGES IN VERSION 0.29-0, 0.29-1, 0.29-2, 0.29-3

SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES

   o	There is a generic conflict with 'backsolve' between spam
   	and other packages (e.g., bdsmatrix). To avoid the issue,
	we use the standard generic implemented in 'methods' which
	requires an additional argument for version 0.29-0 (see 
	also PR#14883). 
	However to maintain backwards compatibility with packages
	that depend on spam, this was reverted in 0.29-1. 

	Currently, this conflict is not properly solved. I propose
	to load 'spam' first then the other packages, followed by
	manually calling:

	  setMethod("backsolve","spam.chol.NgPeyton",backsolve.spam)
	  setMethod("backsolve","spam",backsolve.spam)

	Stay tuned...

   o	Calls like:
        
	  mat <- diag.spam(4)
	  diag( mat[-1,]) <- 3
  	  diag.spam( mat[,-1]) <-2

	now work. They are, however, somewhat inefficient. 
	'toeplitz.spam' is to be prefered. Pointed out by
	Florian Gerber.

   o	The Gibbs sampler in the demo article-jss-example2 contains 
   	several bugs, pointed out by Steve Geinitz and Andrea Riebler. 
	I'll post an updated sampler in a future release.


NEW FEATURES

   o	New functions 'rmvnorm.const', 'rmvnorm.prec.const' and
   	'rmvnorm.canonical.const' to draw constrained multivariate
	normal variates.

   o	New functions 'precmat' (wrapper to), 'precmat.RW1', 'precmat.RW2', 
    	'precmat.season', 'precmat.IGMRFreglat' and 'precmat.IGMRFirreglat'
   	to create precision matrices for IGMRF.

   o	New methods 'rowSums', 'colSums' and  'rowMeans', 'colMeans' for
   	'spam' objects.

   o	New methods 'head' and 'tail' for 'spam' and 'spam.chol.NgPeyton' 
   	objects.

   o 	New method 'chol2inv' for 'spam' object.

   o	New option 'inefficiencywarning': handling of warnings issued 
   	in case of an inefficient calculation. 

   o	New option 'structurebased': should operations be performed on
   	the nonzero entries or on including the zeros. Classical example:
	what should the cosine of a sparse matrix look like?
	In the near future, all operations from Math and Ops will include
	this option. Some loss of backwards compatibility might be 
	lost in the future.  


INTERNAL CHANGES

   o	New much faster approach to extract rows. For not too sparse 
   	large matrices improvements over two orders of magnitudes are
	achieved.
	
   o 	Elininated '.Internal()' calls that induce a 'Note' on CRAN
   	checks. This also implied a minor rewrite of 'image.spam'.	

   o 	Minor code improvements. 

   o	Eliminated non-API calls (29.1).

   o	Rewritten .C("bincode",...) call as suggested by Brian Ripley
   	(29.2).
  

BUG FIXES

   o 	Bug fix that occures when multiplying elementwise matrices 
   	that have non-intersecting structures (pointed out by 
	Corentin Barbu).

   o	Bug fix in triangular backsolves involving 'spam' objects 
   	and rhs matrices.

   o	Bug fix in triangular backsolve causing errors on some
   	architectures.




	CHANGES IN VERSION 0.28

NEW FEATURES

   o	New function 'cleanup' (suggested by Simon Barthelme). 

   o 	Extending help files.

   o 	Improved functionality of 'isSymmetric'.


INTERNAL CHANGES

   o	Proper storage of data files.

   o 	Cleaning up argument names within spam functions.	 

   o    Cleaning up old Fortran code, i.e., eliminating
   	unnecessary subroutines and write calls.


BUG FIXES

   o 	Bug fix that may occure when extracting zero elements 
        (pointed out by Corentin Barbu).




	CHANGES IN VERSION 0.27

NEW FEATURES

    o	Requires now R2.10 and higher.

    o	Functions to create Toeplitz and circulant matrices.

    o 	Function to create precision matrices for gridded GMRF.

    o	Improvements in the mle.* functions.

    o	Method diff for sparse matrices (suggested by Paul Eilers).

    o 	Improvement of help pages. 

    o	Eliminated some help aliases to base functions 
    	(for which no 'usage' is given). 


INTERNAL CHANGES

    o  	Change to iL coding.

    o	Start to using 'identical'.

    o 	Code cleaning due to requirement of R2.10 and higher.


BUG FIXES

    o   Bug fix in as.spam.list (thanks to Paul Eilers).

    o 	Bug fix in demo(spam) (thanks to Thomas Gsponer).





	CHANGES IN VERSION 0.24, 0.25 and 0.26
	
    o 	Devel versions, not released.	





	CHANGES IN VERSION 0.23

NEW FEATURES

    o	Further improved versions of demos. 

    o	Some improvements to meet Rd standards.
        Adjustments for future R versions. 





	CHANGES IN VERSION 0.22

NEW FEATURES

    o	Improved versions of demos. Synchronized with the JSS article.

    o   Additional changes and improvements in the help files (thanks
    	to Steve Geinitz).


    




	CHANGES IN VERSION 0.21

	
NEW FEATURES

    o	New NEWS file, to work better with news() command.
    	The previous is available under ONEWS.


    o 	New functions bandwidth, permutation, mle[.nomean][.spam],
    	neg2loglikelihood[.spam].
   

    o	Renamed adiag.spam to bdiag.spam.


    o	Cleaned up argument naming with the rmvnorm.* 
    	suite.


INTERNAL CHANGES

    o   Various Fortran code, R code and help file 
    	improvements.


BUG FIXES

    o	Minor change in one of the demos (solves a 64bit issue). 	

