This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
The behaviour of ‘unlink()’ for reparse points (including junctions and symbolic links) has changed. It no longer follow links (deleting the contents of the link target rather than the link), and it is able to delete the link itself (given sufficient permissions).
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 commonly 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.
‘file.symlink()’ is now implemented on NTFS file systems on Vista or later, for accounts which have suitable permissions (and most will not). It can link existing directories, and existing-or-not files.
Using a prompt of more than 80 characters in ‘readline()’ could cause a buffer overflow in Rterm. (Reported by Henrik Bengtsson.)
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’ just because environment variable ‘R_GSCMD’ is set.
The internal ‘untar()’ (as used by default by ‘R CMD INSTALL’) now knows about some ‘pax’ headers which ‘bsdtar’ (e.g. the default ‘tar’ for Mac OS >= 10.6) can incorrectly include in ‘tar’ files, and will skip them with a warning.
The behaviour of ‘unlink(recursive = TRUE)’ for a symbolic link to a directory has changed: it now removes the link rather than the directory contents (as ‘rm -r’ does).
On Windows it no longer follows reparse points (includiing junctions and symbolic links).
The ‘exportMethods’ directive now exports generics as necessary, as the extensions manual said it does. The manual has also been updated to be a little more informative on this point.
Reference methods can not safely use non-exported entries in the namespace. We now do not do so, and warn in the documentation.
‘readLines()’ could overflow a buffer if the last line was not terminated. (PR#14766)
Several stack trampling and overflow issues have been fixed in TRE, triggered by ‘agrep’ and friends with long patterns. (PR#14627)
‘persp(box = TRUE)’ now warns if the surface extends outside the box (since occlusion for the box and axes is computed assuming the box is a bounding box). (PR#202)