This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
Setting the ‘LC_ALL’ category in ‘Sys.setlocale()’ invalidates any cached locale-specific day/month names and the AM/PM indicator for ‘strptime()’ (as setting ‘LC_TIME’ has since R 3.1.0).
The version of LAPACK included in the sources has been updated to 3.7.1, a bug-fix release.
The default for ‘tools::write_PACKAGES(rds_compress=)’ has been changed to ‘"xz"’ to match the compression used by CRAN.
‘c()’ and ‘unlist()’ are now more efficient in constructing the ‘names(.)’ of their return value, thanks to a proposal by Suharto Anggono. (PR#17284)
‘R CMD check’ checks for and ‘R CMD build’ corrects CRLF line endings in shell scripts ‘configure’ and ‘cleanup’ (even on Windows).
The order of selection of OpenMP flags has been changed: Oracle Developer Studio 12.5 accepts ‘-fopenmp’ and ‘-xopenmp’ but only the latter enables OpenMP so it is now tried first.
‘within(List, rm(x1, x2))’ works correctly again, also when ‘List[["x2"]]’ is ‘NULL’.
‘regexec(pattern, text, *)’ now also applies ‘as.character(.)’ to its first two arguments, as documented.
‘write.table()’ and related functions, ‘writeLines()’, and perhaps other functions writing text to connections did not signal errors when the writes failed, e.g. due to a disk being full. Errors will now be signalled if detected during the write, warnings if detected when the connection is closed. (PR#17243)
‘rt()’ assumed the ‘ncp’ parameter was a scalar. (PR#17306)
‘menu(choices)’ with more than 10 choices which easily fit into one ‘getOption("width")’-line no longer erroneously repeats choices. (PR#17312)
‘length()<-’ on a pairlist succeeds. (<URL: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2017-July/074680.html>)
Language objects such as ‘quote(("\n"))’ or R functions are correctly printed again, where R 3.4.1 accidentally duplicated the backslashes.
Construction of ‘names()’ for very large objects in ‘c()’ and ‘unlist()’ now works, thanks to Suharto Anggono's patch proposals in PR#17292.
Resource leaks (and similar) reported by Steve Grubb fixed. (PR#17314, PR#17316, PR#17317, PR#17318, PR#17319, PR#17320)
‘model.matrix(~1, mf)’ now gets the row names from ‘mf’ also when they differ from ‘1:nrow(mf)’, fixing PR#14992 thanks to the suggestion by Sebastian Meyer.
‘sigma(fm)’ now takes the correct denominator degrees of freedom for a fitted model with ‘NA’ coefficients. (PR#17313)
‘hist(x, "FD")’ no longer “dies” with a somewhat cryptic error message when ‘x’ has extreme outliers or ‘IQR()’ zero: ‘nclass.FD(x)’ tries harder to find a robust bin width h in the latter case, and ‘hist.default(*, breaks)’ now checks and corrects a too large ‘breaks’ number. (PR#17274)
‘callNextMethod()’ works for ‘...’ methods.
‘qr.coef(qd, y)’ now has correct names also when ‘qd’ is a complex QR or stems from ‘qr(*, LAPACK=TRUE)’.
Setting ‘options(device = *)’ to an invalid function no longer segfaults when plotting is initiated. (PR#15883)
‘encodeString(<very large string>)’ no longer segfaults. (PR#15885)
It is again possible to use ‘configure --enable-maintainer-mode’ without having installed ‘notangle’ (it was required in R 3.4.[01]).
Dispatch on ‘...’ calls the method using its name, instead of ‘.Method’ (for consistency with default dispatch), and only attempts to pass non-missing arguments from the generic.
‘readRDS(textConnection(.))’ works again. (PR#17325)
‘(1:n)[-n]’ no longer segfaults for ‘n <- 2.2e9’ (on a platform with enough RAM).
‘x <- 1:2; tapply(x, list(x, x), function(x) "")[1,2]’ now correctly returns ‘NA’ again. (PR#17333)
Running of finalizers after explicit GC request moved from the R interface ‘do_gc’ to the ‘C’ interface ‘R_gc’. This helps with reclaiming inaccessible connections.
‘help.search(topic)’ and ‘??topic’ matching topics in vignettes with multiple file name extensions (e.g., ‘*.md.rsp’ but not ‘*.Rmd’) failed with an error when using ‘options(help_type = "html")’.
The X11 device no longer uses the Xlib backing store (PR#16497).
‘array(character(), 1)’ now gives (a 1D array with) ‘NA’ as has been documented for a long time as in the other cases of zero-length array initialization and also compatibly with ‘matrix(character(), *)’. As mentioned there, this also fixes PR#17333.
‘splineDesign(.., derivs = 4)’ no longer segfaults.
‘fisher.test(*, hybrid=TRUE)’ now (again) will use the hybrid method when Cochran's conditions are met, fixing PR#16654.