Version 1.4-0 (2026-07-02)

  o New maintainer: Nicolai Meinshausen <meinshausen@gmail.com>.

  o Substantial speed improvements, all without changing results:
    - predict() now computes quantiles with a single vectorized
      sort per prediction matrix instead of calling quantile()
      once per observation (predictions on new data are now
      considerably faster; results are unchanged, type-7 quantiles
      as before).
    - Fitting with keep.inbag=TRUE previously used an O(n^2) loop
      per tree to sample out-of-bag responses; this is now fully
      vectorized. The overhead of keep.inbag=TRUE over a plain fit
      is reduced by more than an order of magnitude for larger n.
    - quantregForest() no longer computes the terminal-node matrix
      of the training data twice when keep.inbag=TRUE.
    - Out-of-bag predictions via predict() without newdata are much
      faster.

  o Removed a broken, unreachable duplicate definition of
    quantregForest() in R/convert.R that masked the real function
    during package collation.

  o quantregForest is now a pure R package. The bundled copy of the
    C/Fortran sources and R helper functions of the randomForest
    package (used only for fitting with nthreads > 1) has been
    removed; parallel fitting now calls randomForest() directly in
    each fork and merges the forests with randomForest::combine().
    This removes the compiler dependency, keeps the parallel code
    path automatically in sync with upstream randomForest, and does
    not change the fitted forests.

  o RColorBrewer is no longer attached (it was needed only by the
    removed copies of randomForest plotting helpers).
