This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
‘factor(x, exclude = L)’ behaves more rationally when ‘x’ or ‘L’ are character vectors. Further, ‘exclude = <factor>’ now behaves as documented for long.
Convenience function ‘hasName()’ has been added; it is intended to replace the common idiom ‘!is.null(x$name)’ without the usually unintended partial name matching.
(Windows only.) ‘file.info()’ now returns file timestamps including fractions of seconds; it has done so on other platforms since R 2.14.0. (NB: some filesystems do not record modification and access timestamps to sub-second resolution.)
If available, the POSIX 2008 system call ‘utimensat’ will be used by ‘setFileTime()’ and ‘file.copy(copy.date = TRUE)’. This may result in slightly more accurate file times.
(Windows only) Function ‘setInternet2()’ is defunct.
Installation support for ‘readline’ emulations based on ‘editline’ (aka ‘libedit’) is deprecated.
Convenience function ‘hasName()’ has been added; it is intended to
replace the common idiom ‘!is.null(x$name)’ without the usually
unintended partial name matching.
The online documentation for package ‘methods’ is extensively rewritten. The goals are to simplify documentation for basic use, to note old features not recommended and to correct out-of-date information.
Calls to ‘setMethod()’ no longer print a message when creating a generic function in those cases where that is natural: S3 generics and primitives.
Use ‘options(deparse.max.lines=)’ to limit the number of lines recorded in ‘.Traceback’ and other deparsing activities.
‘abbreviate()’ gains an option ‘named = TRUE’.
If a package added a class to a class union in another package, loading the first package gave erroneous warnings about “undefined subclass”.
‘rbeta(4, NA)’ and similarly ‘rgamma()’ and ‘rnbinom()’ now return ‘NaN’'s with a warning, as other r<dist>(), and as documented. (PR#17155)
Using ‘options(checkPackageLicense = TRUE)’ no longer requires acceptance of the licence for non-default standard packages such as ‘compiler’. (Reported by Mikko Korpela.)
When an S4 class name matches multiple classes in the S4 cache, perform a dynamic search in order to obey namespace imports. This should eliminate annoying messages about multiple hits in the class cache. Also, pass along the package from the ‘ClassExtends’ object when looking up superclasses in the cache.