This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
The 32-bit and 64-bit builds are now treated equally, as it is anticipated that 64-bit R will soon be (if not already) the more comonly used. This entails:
The ‘Rterm’ or ‘Rgui’ title mentions 32-bit as well as 64-bit.
The desktop icons are labelled ‘R i386’ and ‘R x64’.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ for a package with compiled code will fail if compilation fails for any of the installed sub-architectures: use ‘--no-multiarch’ to override this.
Optimization level ‘-O3’ is now used by default on 64-bit builds as
well as 32-bit ones.
Function ‘compactPDF()’ in package ‘tools’ now takes the default for argument ‘gs_quality’ from environment variable ‘GS_QUALITY’: there is a new value ‘"none"’, the ultimate default, which prevents GhostScript being used in preference to ‘qpdf’ even if environment variable ‘R_GSCMD’ is set.
Building with a positive value of ‘--with-valgrind-instrumentation’ now also instruments logical, complex and raw vectors.
‘tempfile()’ on a Unix-alike now takes the process ID into account. This is needed with ‘multicore’ (and as part of ‘parallel’) because the parent and all the children share a session temporary directory, and they can share the C random number stream used to produce the unique part. Further, two children can call ‘tempfile()’ simultaneously.
‘options(warn = 0)’ failed to end a (C-level) context with more than 50 accumulated warnings. (Spotted by Jeffrey Horner.)
Automatic printing for reference classes is now done by the ‘$show()’ method. A method is defined for class ‘envRefClass’ and may be overridden for user classes (see the ‘?ReferenceClasses’ example). S4 ‘show()’ methods should no longer be needed for reference classes.
The body of a closure can be one of further types of R objects, including environments and external pointers.
A dependency on SVN revision is allowed for ‘R’, e.g. ‘R (>= r56550)’. This should be used in conjunction with a version number, e.g. ‘R (>= 2.14.0), R (>= r56550)’ to distinguish between R-patched and R-devel versions with the same SVN revision.
‘pbirthday()’ and ‘qbirthday()’ did not implement the algorithm exactly as given in their reference and so were unnecessarily inaccurate.
‘pbirthday()’ now solves the approximate formula analytically rather than using ‘uniroot()’ on a discontinuous function.
The description of the problem was inaccurate: the probability is a tail probability (‘2 _or more_ people share a birthday’)
Rd conversion to latex mishandled multi-line titles (including cases where there was a blank line in the ‘\title’ section). (It seems this happened only in 2.13.0 patched.)