This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
Some recently-added Windows time zone names have been added to the conversion table used to convert these to Olson names. (Including those relating to changes for Russia in Oct 2014, as in PR#16503.)
(Windows) Compatibility information has been added to the manifests for ‘Rgui.exe’, ‘Rterm.exe’ and ‘Rscript.exe’. This should allow ‘win.version()’ and ‘Sys.info()’ to report the actual Windows version up to Windows 10.
Windows ‘"wininet"’ FTP first tries EPSV / PASV mode rather than only using active mode (reported by Dan Tenenbaum).
‘which.min(x)’ and ‘which.max(x)’ may be much faster for logical and integer ‘x’ and now also work for long vectors.
The ‘emulation’ part of ‘tools::texi2dvi()’ has been somewhat enhanced, including supporting ‘quiet = TRUE’. It can be selected by ‘texi2dvi = "emulation"’.
(Windows) MiKTeX removed its ‘texi2dvi.exe’ command in Sept 2015: ‘tools::texi2dvi()’ tries ‘texify.exe’ if it is not found.
(Windows only) Shortcuts for printing and saving have been added to menus in ‘Rgui.exe’. (Request of PR#16572.)
‘loess(..., iterTrace=TRUE)’ now provides diagnostics for robustness iterations, and the ‘print()’ method for ‘summary(<loess>)’ shows slightly more.
The included version of PCRE has been updated to 8.38, a bug-fix release.
‘View()’ now displays nested data frames in a more friendly way. (Request with patch in PR#15915.)
The included configuration code for ‘libintl’ has been updated to that from ‘gettext’ version 0.19.5.1 - this should only affect how an external library is detected (and the only known instance is under OpenBSD). (Wish of PR#16464.)
‘configure’ has a new argument ‘--disable-java’ to disable the checks for Java.
The ‘configure’ default for ‘MAIN_LDFLAGS’ has been changed for the FreeBSD, NetBSD and Hurd OSes to one more likely to work with compilers other than ‘gcc’ (FreeBSD 10 defaults to ‘clang’).
‘configure’ now supports the OpenMP flags ‘-fopenmp=libomp’ (clang) and ‘-qopenmp’ (Intel C).
Various macros can be set to override the default behaviour of ‘configure’ when detecting OpenMP: see file ‘config.site’.
Source installation on Windows has been modified to allow for MiKTeX installations without ‘texi2dvi.exe’. See file ‘MkRules.dist’.
‘regexpr(pat, x, perl = TRUE)’ with Python-style named capture did not work correctly when ‘x’ contained ‘NA’ strings. (PR#16484)
The description of dataset ‘ToothGrowth’ has been improved/corrected. (PR#15953)
‘model.tables(type = "means")’ and hence ‘TukeyHSD()’ now support ‘"aov"’ fits without an intercept term. (PR#16437)
‘close()’ now reports the status of a ‘pipe()’ connection opened with an explicit ‘open’ argument. (PR#16481)
Coercing a list without names to a data frame is faster if the elements are very long. (PR#16467)
(Unix-only) Under some rare circumstances piping the output from ‘Rscript’ or ‘R -f’ could result in attempting to close the input file twice, possibly crashing the process. (PR#16500)
(Windows) ‘Sys.info()’ was out of step with ‘win.version()’ and did not report Windows 8.
‘topenv(baseenv())’ returns ‘baseenv()’ again as in R 3.1.0 and earlier. This also fixes ‘compilerJIT(3)’ when used in ‘.Rprofile’.
‘detach()’ing the ‘methods’ package keeps ‘.isMethodsDispatchOn()’ true, as long as the methods namespace is not unloaded.
Removed some spurious warnings from ‘configure’ about the preprocessor not finding header files. (PR#15989)
‘rchisq(*, df=0, ncp=0)’ now returns ‘0’ instead of ‘NaN’, and ‘dchisq(*, df=0, ncp=*)’ also no longer returns ‘NaN’ in limit cases (where the limit is unique). (PR#16521)
‘pchisq(*, df=0, ncp > 0, log.p=TRUE)’ no longer underflows (for ncp > ~60).
‘nchar(x, "w")’ returned -1 for characters it did not know about (e.g. zero-width spaces): it now assumes 1. It now knows about most zero-width characters and a few more double-width characters.
Help for ‘which.min()’ is now more precise about behavior with logical arguments. (PR#16532)
The print width of character strings marked as ‘"latin1"’ or ‘"bytes"’ was in some cases computed incorrectly.
‘abbreviate()’ did not give names to the return value if ‘minlength’ was zero, unlike when it was positive.
(Windows only) ‘dir.create()’ did not always warn when it failed to create a directory. (PR#16537)
When operating in a non-UTF-8 multibyte locale (e.g. an East Asian locale on Windows), ‘grep()’ and related functions did not handle UTF-8 strings properly. (PR#16264)
‘read.dcf()’ sometimes misread lines longer than 8191 characters. (Reported by Hervé Pagès with a patch.)
‘within(df, ..)’ no longer drops columns whose name start with a ‘"."’.
The built-in ‘HTTP’ server converted entire ‘Content-Type’ to lowercase including parameters which can cause issues for multi-part form boundaries (PR#16541).
Modifying slots of S4 objects could fail when the ‘methods’ package was not attached. (PR#16545)
‘splineDesign(*, outer.ok=TRUE)’ (‘splines’) is better now (PR#16549), and ‘interpSpline()’ now allows ‘sparse=TRUE’ for speedup with non-small sizes.
If the expression in the traceback was too long, ‘traceback()’ did not report the source line number. (Patch by Kirill Müller.)
The browser did not truncate the display of the function when exiting with ‘options("deparse.max.lines")’ set. (PR#16581)
When ‘bs(*, Boundary.knots=)’ had boundary knots inside the data range, extrapolation was somewhat off. (Patch by Trevor Hastie.)
‘var()’ and hence ‘sd()’ warn about ‘factor’ arguments which are deprecated now. (PR#16564)
‘loess(*, weights = *)’ stored wrong weights and hence gave slightly wrong predictions for ‘newdata’. (PR#16587)
‘aperm(a, *)’ now preserves ‘names(dim(a))’.
‘poly(x, ..)’ now works when either ‘raw=TRUE’ or ‘coef’ is specified. (PR#16597)
‘data(package=*)’ is more careful in determining the path.
‘prettyNum(*, decimal.mark, big.mark)’: fixed bug introduced when fixing PR#16411.