This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
(OS X only.) Package ‘tcltk’ checks when loaded if it is linked against the CRAN X11-based Tcl/Tk and if so that the Tcl/Tk component and the X11 libraries are installed. This allows more informative error messages to be given advising the installation of the missing component or of XQuartz.
The ‘X11()’ device and X11-based versions of the data editor and viewer (invoked by ‘edit()’ and ‘View()’ for data frames and matrices from command-line R) check that the X11 libraries are installed and if not advises installing XQuartz.
‘R CMD check’ now by default checks code usage directly on the package namespace without loading and attaching the package and its suggests and enhances. For good practice with packages in the ‘Suggests’ field, see §1.1.3.1 of ‘Writing R Extensions’. For use of lazy-data objects in the package's own code, see ‘?data’.
A longstanding bug exhibited by ‘nlminb()’ on Windows was traced to a compiler bug in gcc 4.6.3; a workaround has been put in place. (PR#15244 and PR#15914).
Rendering of ‘\command’ in HTML versions of help pages has been improved: this is particularly evident on the help page for ‘INSTALL’.
Forking in package ‘parallel’ called C entry point ‘exit’ in the child. This was unsafe (‘_exit’ should have been called), and could flush ‘stdin’ of the main R process (seen most often on Solaris).
As good practice, ‘stdout’ is now flushed before forking a child.
‘getAnywhere("C_pbinom")’ now returns correctly a single object (rather than unlisting it).
The ‘plot’ method for ‘"hclust"’ objects gets an optional argument ‘check’; When that is true (the default) it checks more carefully for valid input.
‘RShowDoc("NEWS")’ now displays the PDF version.
Matrices and arrays with last dimension zero did not print at all or incompletely. (PR#16012)
The internal method of ‘download.file()’ was not reporting file sizes and progress correctly on files larger than 2GB (inherited from ‘libxml2’). This is corrected for 64-bit builds (32-bit platforms may not support such files, but where possible will be supported in future versions of R).