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A general description is here.
Configuring with ‘--disable-byte-compilation’ will override the ‘DESCRIPTION’ files of recommended packages, which typically require byte-compilation.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ has a new option ‘--no-byte-compile’ which will override a ‘ByteCompile’ field in the packages's ‘DESCRIPTION’ file.
All the (where necessary cut-down) vignettes are installed if R was configured with ‘--without-recommended-packages’.