This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
File ‘NEWS’ is now generated at installation with a slightly different format: it will be in UTF-8 on platforms using UTF-8, and otherwise in ASCII. There is also a PDF version, ‘NEWS.pdf’, installed at the top-level of the R distribution.
A new facility has been added for inserting code into a package without re-installing it, to facilitate testing changes which can be selectively added and backed out. See ‘?insertSource’.
‘system(command, intern = TRUE)’ now gives an error on a Unix-alike (as well as on Windows) if ‘command’ cannot be run. It reports a non-success exit status from running ‘command’ as a warning.
On a Unix-alike an attempt is made to return the actual exit status of the command in ‘system(intern = FALSE)’: previously this had been system-dependent but on POSIX-compliant systems the value return was 256 times the status.
New ‘adjustcolor()’ utility, e.g., for simple translucent color schemes.
‘R CMD check’ has a new argument ‘--extra-arch’ to confine tests to those needed to check an additional sub-architecture.
Its check for “Subdirectory 'inst' contains no files” is more thorough: it looks for files, and warns if there are only empty directories.
Environment variables such as ‘R_LIBS’ and those used for customization can be set for the duration of checking _via_ a file ‘~/.R/check.Renviron’ (in the format used by ‘.Renviron’, and with sub-architecture specific versions such as ‘~/.R/check.Renviron.i386’ taking precedence).
There are new options ‘--multiarch’ to check the package under all of the installed sub-architectures and ‘--no-multiarch’ to confine checking to the sub-architecture under which ‘check’ is invoked. If neither option is supplied, a test is done of installed sub-architectures and all those which can be run on the current OS are used.
Unless multiple sub-architectures are selected, the install done by ‘check’ for testing purposes is only of the current sub-architecture (_via_ ‘R CMD INSTALL --no-multiarch’).
It will skip the check for non-ascii characters in code or data if the environment variables ‘_R_CHECK_ASCII_CODE_’ or ‘_R_CHECK_ASCII_DATA_’ are respectively set to ‘FALSE’. (Suggestion of Vince Carey.)
‘R CMD build’ no longer creates an ‘INDEX’ file (‘R CMD INSTALL’ does so), and ‘--force’ removes (rather than overwrites) an existing ‘INDEX’ file.
It supports a file ‘~/.R/build.Renviron’ analogously to ‘check’.
It now runs build-time ‘\Sexpr’ expressions in help files.