This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
‘require(pkg, quietly = TRUE)’ is quieter and in particular does not warn if the package is not found.
Use of ‘ftp://’ URIs should be regarded as deprecated, with on-going support confined to ‘method = "libcurl"’ and not routinely tested. (Nowadays no major browser supports them.)
The non-default ‘method = "internal"’ is deprecated for ‘http://’ and ‘ftp://’ URIs for both ‘download.file’ and ‘url’.
On Windows, ‘method = "wininet"’ is deprecated for ‘http://’, ‘https://’ and ‘ftp://’ URIs for both ‘download.file’ and ‘url’. (A warning is only given for ‘ftp://’.)
For ‘ftp://’ URIs the default method is now ‘"libcurl"’ if available (which it is on CRAN builds).
‘method = "wininet"’ remains the default for ‘http://’ and ‘https://’ URIs but if ‘libcurl’ is available, using ‘method = "libcurl"’ is preferred.
‘make check’ now works also without a LaTeX installation. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18103.)
‘make check-devel’ works again in an R build configured with ‘--without-recommended-packages’.
‘qnbinom(p, size, mu)’ for large ‘size/mu’ is correct now in a range of cases (PR#18095); similarly for the ‘(size, prob)’ parametrization of the negative binomial. Also ‘qpois()’ and ‘qbinom()’ are better and or faster for extreme cases. The underlying C code has been modularized and is common to all four cases of discrete distributions.
‘gap.axis’ is now part of the ‘axis()’ arguments which are passed from ‘bxp()’, and hence ‘boxplot()’. (Thanks to Martin Smith's report and suggestions in PR#18109.)
‘.First’ and ‘.Last’ can again be set from the site profile.
‘seq.int(from, to, *)’ and ‘seq.default(..)’ now work better in large range cases where ‘from-to’ is infinite where the two boundaries are finite.
‘all.equal(x,y)’ now returns ‘TRUE’ correctly also when several entries of ‘abs(x)’ and ‘abs(y)’ are close to ‘.Machine$double.xmax’, the largest finite ‘numeric’.
‘model.frame()’ now clears the object bit when removing the ‘class’ attribute of a value via ‘na.action’ (PR#18100).
‘charClass()’ now works with multi-character strings on Windows (PR#18104, fixed by Bill Dunlap).
‘encodeString()’ on Solaris now works again in Latin-1 encoding on characters represented differently in UTF-8. Support for surrogate pairs on Solaris has been improved.
‘file.show()’ on Windows now works with non-ASCII path names representable in the current native encoding (PR#18132).
Embedded R on Windows can now find R home directory via the registry even when installed only for the current user (PR#18135).
‘pretty(x)’ with finite ‘x’ now returns finite values also in the case where the extreme ‘x’ values are close in size to the maximal representable number ‘.Machine$double.xmax’.
Also, it's been tweaked for very small ranges and when a boundary is close (or equal) to zero; e.g., ‘pretty(c(0,1e-317))’ no longer has negative numbers, currently still warning about a very small range, and ‘pretty(2^-(1024 - 2^-1/(c(24,10))))’ is more accurate.
The error message for not finding vignette files when weaving has correct file sizes now. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18154.)