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A general description is here.
There is a new family, ‘"ArialMT"’, for the ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ devices. This will only be rendered correctly on viewers which have access to Monotype TrueType fonts (which are sometimes requested by journals).
(On Windows, by default on OS X and optionally elsewhere.) The system C function ‘strftime’ has been replaced by a more comprehensive version with closer conformance to the POSIX 2008 standard.
There is support to use the included (64-bit) time-zone conversion code and Olson time-zone database: use ‘configure’ option ‘--with-internal-tzcode’. This is the default on Windows and OS X.
(It might be necessary to set environment variable ‘TZ’ on OSes where this is not already set, although the system timzone is deduced correctly on at least Linux, OS X and Windows.)
This option also switches to the version of ‘strftime’ included in directory ‘src/extra/tzone’.
‘R CMD check’ customizations such as ‘_R_CHECK_DEPENDS_ONLY_’ make available packages only in ‘LinkingTo’ only for installation, and not for loading/runtime tests.
Only vignettes sources in directory ‘vignettes’ are considered to be vignettes by ‘R CMD check’. That has been the preferred location since R 2.14.0 and is now obligatory.
‘R CMD check --as-cran’ warns about a false value of the ‘DESCRIPTION’ field ‘BuildVignettes’ for Open Source packages, and ignores it. (An Open Source package needs to have complete sources for its vignettes which should be usable on a suitably well-equipped system).
The included LAPACK subset now contains ‘ZGESDD’ and ‘ZGELSD’.
‘install.packages(dependencies = value)’ for ‘value = NA’ (the default) or ‘value = TRUE’ omits packages only in ‘LinkingTo’ for binary package installs.