This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
‘download.file()’ has an ‘extra’ argument to pass additional command-line options to the non-default methods using command-line utilities.
‘cacheOK = FALSE’ is now supported for ‘method = "curl"’.
‘smooth.spline()’ gains a ‘tol’ argument which controls how different ‘x’ values need to be to be treated as distinct. The default has been changed to be more reliable for inputs whose range is small compared to their maximum absolute value. (Wish of PR#14452.)
Character-string arguments such as the ‘mode’ argument of ‘vector()’, ‘as.vector()’ and ‘is.vector()’ and the ‘description’ argument of ‘file()’ are required to be of length exactly one, rather than any further elements being silently discarded. This helps catch incorrect usage in programming.
The ‘length’ argument of ‘vector()’ and its wrappers such as ‘numeric()’ is required to be of length exactly one (other values are now an error rather than giving a warning as previously).
‘available.packages()’ now works around servers that fail to return an error code when ‘PACKAGES.gz’ does not exist. (Patch submitted by Seth Schommer.)
New function ‘adist()’ in package ‘utils’ for computing ‘edit’ (generalized Levenshtein) distances between strings.
A package R code but without a ‘NAMESPACE’ file will have a default one created at ‘R CMD build’ or ‘R CMD INSTALL’ time, so all packages will be installed with namespaces. A consequence of this is that ‘.First.lib()’ functions need to be copied to ‘.onLoad()’ (usually) or ‘.onAttach()’. For the time being, if there is an auto-generated ‘NAMESPACE’ file and no ‘.onLoad()’ nor ‘.onAttach()’ function is found but ‘.First.lib()’ is, it will be run as the attach hook (unless the package is one of a list of known exceptions, when it will be run as the load hook).
‘R CMD check’ now gives an NOTE about S3 methods with their full name
in the usage even if they are exported from a namespace: in almost all
cases they are intended to be used only as methods and should use the
‘\method’ markup. In the other rare cases the recommended form is to
use a function such as ‘coefHclust’ which would not get confused with a
method, document that and register it in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file by
‘s3method(coef, hclust, coefHclust)’.
‘R CMD check’ now gives an error if the R code in a vignette fails to run, unless this is caused by a missing package.
‘R CMD check’ now unpacks tarballs in the same way as ‘R CMD INSTALL’, including making use of the environment variable ‘R_INSTALL_TAR’ to override the default behaviour.
‘R CMD check’ now reports as a NOTE what look like methods documented with their full names even if there is a namespace and they are exported. In almost all cases they are intended to be used only as methods and should use the ‘\method’ markup. In the other rare cases the recommended form is to use a function such as ‘coefHclust’ which would not get confused with a method, document that and register it in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file by ‘s3method(coef, hclust, coefHclust)’.
‘Rscript’ on a Unix-alike now accepts file names containing spaces (provided these are escaped or quoted in the shell).
PCRE has been updated to version 8.13, a bug-fix release with updated Unicode tables (version 6.0.0). An additional patch (r611 from PCRE 8.20-to-be) has been added to fix a collation symbol recognition issue.