In distance correlation, distance covariance functions (dcov, dcor, DCOR) and dcov.test, arguments x and y can now optionally be distance objects (result of dist function or as.dist). Matrices x and y will always be treated as data.
Functions in dcov.c and utilities.c were modified to support arguments that are distances rather than data. In utilities.c the index_distance function changed. In dcov.c there are many changes. Most importantly for the exported objects, there is now an extra required parameter in the dims argument passed from R. In dCOVtest dims must be a vector c(n, p, q, dst, R) where n is sample size, p and q are dimensions of x and y, dst is logical (TRUE if distances) and R is number of replicates. For dCOV dims must be c(n, p, q, dst).