This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
If R uses custom binary type in its ‘.Platform$pkgType’ then ‘R CMD INSTALL --build’ will produce ‘<package>_<ver>_R_<system>-<build>.tar.zstd’ binary files if R has ‘zstd’ support, ‘.tar.xz’ otherwise.
New facilities have been introduced for package integrity verification and package signing. The optional file ‘SHA256’ in a package contains SHA-256 hashes, lengths and paths of files provided in the package allowing for more reliable integrity verification (relative to ‘MD5’). This file is now generated by default in ‘R CMD INSTALL --build’ and optionally via ‘R CMD build --sha256’. A package can be signed by creating a detached GnuPG signature file ‘SHA256.sig’ signing the entirety of the ‘SHA256’ file. Upon installation, the signature is verified using GnuPG, thus ensuring the integrity of the ‘SHA256’ file and by induction all files in the package. Both source and binary packages can be signed. Currently, this only applies to tar-based packages, and the command-line GnuPG ‘gpg’ tool (or equivalent tool named in the ‘GPG’ environment variable) has to be available for signing and verification to work. ‘R CMD INSTALL --sign’ can be used to sign binary packages, including its use with ‘--build’. System-wide GnuPG keyrings for the R installation can be placed in ‘<R_HOME>/etc/keyrings’ as files with ‘.gpg’ extensions and will be checked first before consulting user's GnuPG keyring (if present).
‘plot.lm()’ now omits the smoother in the residuals vs leverage plot. This never made much sense, but if you really want it, you can force the old behaviour by setting ‘panel.raw=panel.smooth’.
R now supports custom binary types which are of the form ‘"<system>.binary.<build>"’ where ‘<system>’ is lower-case name (letters only) of the system and ‘<build>’ is the name of the build (alphanumeric and dashes). The corresponding paths returned by ‘contrib.url’ (which govern the repository layout) with the above ‘type=’ have the form ‘bin/<system>/<build>/contrib/<x.y>’ where ‘<x.y>’ is the R version without patch level. This is a generalisation of the binary types previously supported on macOS. In addition, binary packages can have the extensions ‘.tar.bz2’, ‘.tar.xz’, ‘.tar.zst’ and ‘.tar.zstd’ with the corresponding compression support.