This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
‘is.atomic(NULL)’ now returns ‘FALSE’, as ‘NULL’ is not an atomic vector. Strict back-compatibility would replace ‘is.atomic(foo)’ by ‘(is.null(foo) || is.atomic(foo))’ but should happen only sparingly.
The list of base and recommended package names is now provided by ‘tools :: standard_package_names’.
Where characters are attempted to be plotted by ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ which are not in the selected 8-bit character set (most often Latin-1) and the R session is using a UTF-8 locale, the warning messages will show the UTF-8 character rather than its bytes and one dot will be substituted per character rather than per byte. (Platforms whose ‘iconv()’ does transliteration silently plot the transliteration.)
In a UTF-8 locale some transliterations are now done without warning (e.g., dashes and Unicode minus to hyphen).