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A general description is here.
File ‘share/licenses/licenses.db’ has some clarifications, especially as to which variants of ‘BSD’ and ‘MIT’ is intended and how to apply them to packages. The problematic licence ‘Artistic-1.0’ has been removed.
There is support for vectors longer than 2^31 - 1 elements. This applies to raw, logical, integer, double, complex and character vectors, as well as lists. (Elements of character vectors remain limited to 2^31 - 1 bytes.)
Most operations which can sensibly be done with long vectors work: others may return the error ‘long vectors not supported yet’. Most of these are because they explicitly work with integer indices (e.g. ‘anyDuplicated()’ and ‘match()’) or because other limits (e.g. of character strings or matrix dimensions) would be exceeded or the operations would be extremely slow.
‘serialize()’ to a raw vector is unlimited in size (except by resources).
The C-level function ‘R_alloc’ can now allocate 2^35 or more bytes.
The ‘*.R’ tangled source code for vignettes is now included in tarballs when ‘R CMD build’ is used to produce them. In R 3.0.0, ‘*.R’ files not in the sources will be produced at install time, but eventually this will be dropped.
The package type ‘"mac.binary"’ now looks in a path in the repository without any Mac subtype (which used to be ‘universal’ or ‘leopard’): it looks in ‘bin/macosx/contrib/3.0’ rather than ‘bin/macosx/leopard/contrib/2.15’). This is the type used for the CRAN binary distribution for OS X as from R 3.0.0.
File ‘etc/Makeconf’ makes more use of the macros ‘$(CC)’, ‘$(CXX)’, ‘$(F77)’ and ‘$(FC)’, so the compiler in use can be changed by setting just these (and if necessary the corresponding flags and ‘FLIBS’) in file ‘~/.R/Makevars’.
This is convenient for those working with binary distributions of R, e.g. on OS X.