4.6.1

Changes in R 4.6.1:

New Features:

• The LaTeX class jss bundled in share/texmf/tex/latex/jss.cls has
been updated to work with hyperref version 7.01q (2026/04/24).

• Plain-text (and legacy HTML) conversion for a simple Rd \eqn{}
now handles \geq, \leq, \neq and \ne in addition to \ge and \le
PR#19070.

Bug Fixes:

• abbreviate(<non-ASCII>) now works better, using iswlower() and
*upper() to treat “wide” characters, thanks to Kevin's PR#19058.

• cut(1:11, {}) now signals an error for the invalid breaks, fixing
PR#19057, thanks to Kevin Ushey.

• all(<symbol>) signals an error now, as some similar coercions;
previously, the coercion of the symbol resulted in NULL
internally, raised a warning, and could access illegal memory;
thanks to Kevin Ushey's PR#19054.

• stl() now checks its 3 x 3 tuning parameters on the R level;
stl(*, s.window = 0) now “works” instead dumping core,
stl(*, s.window = 1) “works” correctly, too. Also, the summary() method
mentions the robustness weights only if any robustness iterations
happened.

Further, stl() is now based on C code, translated from previous
Fortran, triggered by a flang 22 compiler optimization bug (-O2).

• The border case zapsmall(x, digits=Inf) where x contains an Inf
entry no longer returns all NaN but rather x. The improved help
page now has more non-default examples.

• wilcox.test(x, exact=FALSE, correct = k)'s p-value computation
got a missing dnorm(z) factor, and so did the 2-sample case, in
addition to more fixes.

• The data part of getGenerics() listed package names for generic
functions defined in more than one package. Now it lists generic
function names, as intended. Thanks to Michael Chirico for
report and patch proposal (PR#19080).

• Overly long dyn.load() error messages (C level dlerror()), should
no longer corrupt its state, thanks to Ivan Krylov's PR#19029
report and patch.

• as.matrix(<POSIXlt>) again produces a numeric matrix, and the
c() and subassignment methods for POSIXlt objects work correctly
more often, e.g., without a "tzone" attribute, back porting a few
of the PR#18989 fixes from R-devel, both thanks to Suharto
Anggono.

• In methods, as() now correctly coerces S4 objects to S4
superclasses extending old-style classes, instead of returning
only the S3 part.

4.6.0

CHANGES IN R 4.6.0:

SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:

• The R citation now provides a DOI (10.32614/R.manuals): please update
  your bibliographies accordingly.

• The default C++ standard has been changed to C++20 where available
  (which it is on all known platforms from 2021 on): if not C++17 is used
  if available otherwise C++ is not supported (as before). (GCC 16 has also
  switched to C++20 as its default.) Packages can request C++17 if
  essential.

• The Sweave driver Rtangle no longer puts empty lines at the end of
  tangled scripts.

NEW FEATURES:

• The default AIC and BIC methods now check whether the methods namespace
  is loaded rather than stats4. They still use stats4::logLik (and
  stats4::nobs), but packages no longer need to load stats4 explicitly.

• confint.default() now also works on S4 objects, as long as suitable
  coef() and vcov() methods exist.

• binomial(identity) and quasibinomial(identity) now work without
  having to quote the argument.

• str() now shows more via format() for external pointers.

• terms(<formula>, specials = *) now treats non-syntactic specials more
  gracefully, thanks to Mikael Jagan's PR#18568.

• help.start() gets a lib.loc option and its default for
  make.packages.html() is enhanced to allow, e.g., fast access to
  .Library when that contains only base and recommended packages.

• In *.Rd help files, the \linkS4class macro now also works for links to
  other packages via \linkS4class[<pkg>]{<myClass>}, much nicer than the
  “workaround” \link[<pkg>:<myClass>-class]{<myClass>} necessary in earlier
  versions of R. Packages with the new syntax need to formally depend on R >= 4.6.0.

• tools::analyze_license() now also computes SPDX license identifiers,
  thanks to Thierry Onkelinx and LLuís Revilla.

• read.dcf() now recognizes lines starting with # as comment lines. By
  Dirk Eddelbuettel, Laurent Gatto and Hugo Gruson.

• tcltk::tclVersion() now only optionally includes the ‘patch level’, as
  Tcl full versions can be of the form 8.7a5 or 9.0b1 without three clear
  components.

• untar(tar = "internal") supports extras = "-P" to use unchanged the
  recorded file paths (as many external tar programs do).

• extSoftVersion()[["zstd"]] now reports the version of the zstd
  compression library if available, thanks to Trevor Davis' patch proposal
  in PR#18914.

• New logical option() quiet, defaulting to false, set to TRUE by R's
  command-line option --quiet (and similar), now can be switched during
  an R session. Prompted by Dirk Eddelbuettel's proposal in PR#18913.

• Credentials for basic HTTP authentication with download method "libcurl"
  can now be provided in a netrc file. The path to the file can be
  specified in options("netrc").

• tools::deparseLatex() gains a math argument, now used by the default
  bibstyle to format bibentry() fields with $...$ syntax via Rd \eqn
  markup.

• gzcon() can now decompress a concatenation of compressed streams PR#18887.

• Bibliographic citations and references in Rd files can now be
  auto-generated from bibentries in bibliographic databases in R or BibTeX
  formats. See RShowDoc("R-exts#Bibliographic-citations-and-references")
  for more information.

• Arguments to loadNamespace() which will be ignored because the
  namespace is already loaded are now noted.

• chkDots()' optional argument allowed has been implemented thanks to
  Trevor Davis' proposal in PR#18936.

• New function messageCondition() to create structured "message" objects
  analogous to warningCondition() and errorCondition() (PR#18940, by
  Trevor Davis).

• wilcox.test() can now perform exact (conditional) inference in case of
  ties. Based on contributions by Torsten Hothorn.

• wilcox.test() can now optionally compute improved asymptotic p-values
  by including up to 3 correction terms of the Edgeworth series for the
  normal approximation.

• barplot(.., orderH = *) for stacked bar plots allows to sort the stacks
  each according to size.

• New argument panel.first for hist() (via plot.histogram()),
  barplot(), bxp(), and hence implicitly boxplot(). All except the
  former also gain a new panel.last. Suggested by Marieke Stolte and Julian
  Welz.

• plot.default() gets a new switch lim2 to indicate that the default xlim
  and ylim range computations only use jointly finite x- and y-values;
  indirectly suggested in PR#7986 by Jincai Jiang.

• Rman.css, the stylesheet for the texi2any-generated HTML versions of
  the R manuals, was improved following joint efforts at the ‘R Dev Days’
  of useR! 2024 and RSECon25.

• New system Rd macro \manual{<name>}{<node>} to refer to a specific
  section etc (possibly empty, for Top) of one of the R manuals (e.g.,
  R-exts).

• list.files() now has optional argument fixed to allow literal pattern
  matching. Suggested and implemented by Duncan Murdoch in PR#18925.

• substring(txt, i1, i2), substr(..) and their replacement versions now
  accept i2 = NULL to mean “to the end_of_string”, thus fulfilling Kevin
  Ushey (and others') suggestions in PR#18851.

• The default method for pretty() gets a new switch bounds for
  completeness, corresponding to .pretty(). Also, it now catches typos
  such as eps.corrected = 2, noted in PR#18521 by Mikko Korpela.

• Plain-text help now renders Rd \describe lists using line breaks after
  item labels. Set tools::Rd2txt_options(descStyle=NULL) to get the old
  behaviour with a simple space; a "colon" variant is also available.

• x %notin% table newly in base is an idiom for !(x %in% table) and
  provided almost entirely for convenience and code readability, from an
  R-devel suggestion, after many years of private definitions mostly hidden
  in packages, including in R's tools package.

• The default method of sequence() gets a new option recycle to swap
  between current (not fully recycling) and future behaviour where all
  three of (nvec, from, by) are jointly recycled.

• ftable()s default method and the as.table() method for "ftable"s get
  a perm argument with back compatible default. The as.table() method
  also gets a named.dim = FALSE switch, no longer creating a named
  dim(<result>) by default.

• match.arg() gets a new option several.ok = "all", fulfilling the wish
  of Jim Hester in PR#16659](https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=PR#16659).

• provideDimnames() gets new switch use.names, as proposed including
  patch by Mikael Jagan, in PR#18975.

• The default summary() is more informative for character vectors,
  optionally resorting to the factor method via the new argument
  character.method = "factor", e.g., when summarizing a data frame
  (PR#16750). It also provides more useful summaries for complex vectors, with polar
  determining if polar or cartesian coordinates are more relevant; mostly
  based on a proposal by Mikael Jagan.

• Error messages from failed Rd \Sexpr code now include the call from the
  original condition (if available). Warning messages now include Rd source
  locations.

• When the environment variable R_WARN_BOUNDS_OPT is set to "yes",
  options(warn = val) will check if val is inside -1:2; this may happen
  unconditionally in the future.

• weighted.residuals() now returns weighted working residuals for "glm"
  objects. It used to return deviance residuals, but these do not give the
  one-step approximated dfbeta values, as pointed out by Ravi Varadhan.
  influence.glm() has been amended so that it now returns an object with
  both a "wt.res" and a "dev.res" element.

• Several influence measures for "glm" objects have been updated to use
  Pearson residuals rather than deviance residuals (the latter are not
  unbiased) and to not use leave-one-out estimates of dispersion in models
  with fixed dispersion. Thanks to Ravi Varadhan for discussions and
  testing of these updates.

• 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.

• The value of .Platform$pkgType which defines the native binary type for
  the current build of R can be overridden with R_PLATFORM_PKGTYPE
  environment variable (previously this was only set by the macOS builds of
  R). This should be typically only done by the author of a binary R
  distribution to define the type of binaries supported by that build of R.

• If R uses custom binary type in its .Platform$pkgType then
  `R CMD INSTALL --bui...

4.5.3

CHANGES IN R 4.5.3:

UTILITIES:

• tools/fetch-recommended can be used instead of
  tools/rsync-recommended to fetch recommended packages into R
  sources using curl on systems without rsync or behind firewalls.

PACKAGE INSTALLATION:

• C++ standard specifications (CXX_STD = in src/Makevars* and in
  the SystemRequirements field of the DESCRIPTION file) are now
  checked more thoroughly. Invalid values are still ignored but
  now give a warning, as do contradictory specifications.

• (Preliminary) support for C++26 has been extended to Windows.

• A non-zero exit status from cleanup, cleanup.win or cleanup.ucrt,
  if requested via options --clean or --preclean, is now reported
  with a warning.

BUG FIXES:

• all.equal(obj, simple, check.class=FALSE) now is true, also when
  simple is a bare atomic vector and obj has a simple class, fixing
  the first part of PR#18971 thanks to Jan Gorecki.

• str(x, give.attr=FALSE) no longer shows attributes when x is a
  zero length "Date" or "POSIXt" object.

• Tweaks to binning for bw.SJ() and bw.ucv() in the very rare case
  of data which have an extremely small range compared to their
  absolute values, e.g., x <- 6e9 + 6:9.

• Formatting book-type bibentry objects now converts LaTeX accents
  also in the publisher and series fields.

• model.frame(~1, list(), na.action=na.pass) and similar
  “border-line” uses no longer produce invalid data frames, fixing
  PR#18977, reported with patch by Mikael Jagan.

• length(<POSIXlt>) <- v is more careful about balancing, notably
  when v is not integer, thanks to Suharto Anggono's remarks on the
  mailing list R-devel.

• approx(<x_with_ties>, <y_with_NA>, na.rm = FALSE) now should
  always call the ties() function, fixing PR#17604 reported by Bill
  Dunlap.

• besselJ(1, 1e-15) and similar now give correct results, thanks to
  Leo Mada and other “R-help”ers.

• vignette(<pkg>::<topic>) is now a documented usage variant and
  confines vignette retrieval to the specified package.

• pretty(ch) again correctly works with ch a character vector of
  numbers.

• persp() labels the three axes correctly also when C level
  atan2pi() is available, fixing PR#19007 by Klaus Schliep.

• Large (tall) subscripts in plotmath expressions are now
  positioned correctly. They were being positioned too high.

• Ops group (Arith, Compare,..) methods for matrix-"ts" now do
  return (zero length) matrices even when the two series do not
  overlap, a very partial fix of PR#18972 which is to be fully
  addressed later.

4.5.2

CHANGES IN R 4.5.2:

UTILITIES:

• R CMD check now handles archives with extension .tar or .tar.zstd
  (where zstd compression is supported by the R build).

BUG FIXES:

• t.test(c(1:3, Inf)) and similar no longer produce an error but
  return a (still not so useful) "htest" result, fixing PR#18901,
  thanks to Jesse Alderliesten.

• attr(., "tsp") <- val now uses getOption("ts.eps") instead of
  hardwired 1e-5; consequently, ts(.., ts.eps=*) now passes ts.eps
  to the "tsp" setting C code; both fixing a long-standing ‘FIXME’.

• insertSource() now ignores the internal .packageName object,
  avoiding a superfluous message.

• In static HTML help, links to vignette files from the default
  doc/index.html page now also work for packages not installed in
  the default .Library, thanks to a report by Patrice Kiener.

• fixInNamespace("<S3method>") failed to update the S3 methods
  table when the generic was not on the search path.

• In plain-text help (Rd2txt), an initial newline from an Rd inline
  \eqn no longer breaks the paragraph.

• hist(*, log = "x") now works without a warning, thanks to Martin
  Smith's PR#18921.

• Subassigning "POSIXlt", i.e., <tdat>[i] <- val and <tdat>[[i]] <- val
  now rebalance as they should, thanks to Mikael Jagan's
  PR#18919.

• <POSIXlt>[*] (re-)setting "balanced", fixing PR#18681 comment wch#7,
  thanks to Mikael Jagan.

• All four of {col,row}{Sums,Means}(Z, na.rm=TRUE) now correctly
  work with complex Z where is.na(Re(Z)) differs from is.na(Im(Z)),
  fixing PR#18942, unearthed by Dirk Eddelbuettel.

• Fix for glyph rendering on the quartz() device when there is
  other (“normal”) text drawn on the device. The problem was that
  the text transformation matrix was not reset so glyphs would be
  rendered incorrectly (often completely outside the device, i.e.,
  not visible).

• Functions install.packages() and download.packages() again
  consult option download.file.method when the download method is
  unspecified.

• Tanguy Barthelemy and colleagues at the ‘R Dev Day’ following
  Rencontres R in May 2025 extended the help page of lm(), fixing
  PR#18058. As suggested by Thomas Soeiro, such not es were also
  added to the glm(), poly() and splines::bs() and ns() pages.

• lbeta(1i, 1) now signals an error, as lbeta() is not implemented
  for complex, fixing PR#18946 from Ben Bolker and Kasper
  Kristensen.

• The Cairo-based SVG device uses pt as the default document unit
  also with Cairo >= 1.17.8 (PR#18912).

• pretty(*, eps.correct = 2) has been fixed, e.g., to avoid over 1
  million length result for pretty(c(0, 1e-322), eps.correct = 2).

• When "POSIXlt" date-time objects are NA-padded from subsetting or
  increasing length in the [ or length<- methods, the
  "balanced" attribute is set to NA, now; noted in PR#18681, thanks
  to Mikael Jagan.

4.5.1

CHANGES IN R 4.5.1:

NEW FEATURES:

• The internal method of unzip() now follows unzip 6.00 in how it
  handles extracted file paths which contain "../". With thanks to
  Ivan Krylov.

INSTALLATION:

• Standalone nmath can be built with early-2025 versions of
  clang-based compilers such as LLVM clang 20, Apple clang 17 and
  Intel icx 2025.0.

• Tcl/Tk 9 can be used to build package tcltk: this has become the
  default in some Linux distributions. N.B. several third-party
  packages currently require Tcl/Tk 8 or even 8.6 without declaring
  so.

BUG FIXES:

• Java detection in javareconf could not detect libjvm.* in the
  zero variant of the JDK (PR#18884). All valid variants as of JDK
  24u are now supported.

• factanal(.., rotation=*) now correctly updates rotmat, fixing
  PR#18886.

• dnbinom(<large>, <muchlarger>, ..) now is 0 correctly, instead of
  NaN or Inf sometimes.

• dbinom(<large>, n=Inf, ..) is 0 now correctly, instead of NaN
  which also fixes many dnbinom() cases, notably those mentioned in
  PR#16727 comment wch#5.

• Fixing C level “binomial deviance” bd0() for extreme arguments
  (preventing under-/overflow) solves more PR#16727 cases and also
  prevents some full accuracy loss in such cases for dbinom(),
  dnbinom(), and via dbinom_raw() potentially dgeom(), dhyper(),
  dbeta(), and df().

• signif(1.**e308, digits) no longer truncates unnecessarily (but
  still to prevent overflow to Inf), fixing PR#18889.

• prettyNum(*, zero.print={>=1-char}, replace.zero=TRUE) now works
  as documented, thanks to Marttila Mikko and Ivan Krylov's
  messages on R-devel.

• pbeta(x, a,b, ..) for very large a,b no longer returns NaN but
  the correct values (0 or 1, or their logs for log.p = TRUE).
  This improves Mathlib's C level bratio() and hence also
  pnbinom(), etc..

R 4.5.0

CHANGES IN R 4.5.0:

NEW FEATURES:

• as.integer(rl) and hence as.raw(rl) now work for a list of raw(1)
  elements, as proposed by Michael Chirico's PR#18696.

• graphics' grid() gains optional argument nintLog.

• New functions check_package_urls() and check_package_dois() in
  package tools for checking URLs and DOIs in package sources.

• New head() and tail() methods for class "ts" time series,
  proposed by Spencer Graves on R-devel.

• New qr.influence() function, a “bare bones” interface to the
  lm.influence() leave-one-out diagnostics computations; wished for
  in PR#18739.

• Package citation() results auto-generated from the package
  metadata now also provide package DOIs for CRAN and Bioconductor
  packages.

• New function grepv() identical to grep() except for the default
  value = TRUE.

• methods(<pkg>:::<genfun>) now does report methods when neither
  the generic nor the methods have been exported.

• pdf() gains an author argument to set the corresponding metadata
  field, and logical arguments timestamp and producer to optionally
  omit the respective metadata. (Thanks to Edzer Pebesma.)

• grDevices::glyphInfo() gains a rot argument to allow per-glyph
  rotation. (Thanks to Daniel Sabanes Bove.)

• Package tools now exports functions CRAN_current_db(),
  CRAN_aliases_db(), CRAN_rdxrefs_db(), CRAN_archive_db(), and
  CRAN_authors_db().

• Package tools now exports functions R() and
  parse_URI_reference().

• Package tools now exports functions base_aliases_db() and
  base_rdxrefs_db().

• It is now possible to set the background color for row and column
  names in the data editor on Windows (Rgui).

• Rterm on Windows now accepts input lines of unlimited length.

• file.info() on Windows now provides file owner name and domain.

• Sys.info() on Windows now provides current user domain.

• findInterval() gets new arguments checkSorted and checkNA which
  allow skipping relatively costly checks; related to PR#16567.

• pnorm(x) underflows more gracefully.

• get(nam, env) now signals a classed error, "getMissingError",
  as “subclass” of "missingArgError" where the latter is used also
  in similar situations, e.g., f <- function(x) exp(x); try(f()) .

• The set operations now avoid the as.vector() transformation for
  same-kind apparently vector-like operands.

• md5sum() can be used to compute an MD5 hash of a raw vector of
  bytes by using the bytes= argument instead of files=. The two
  arguments are mutually exclusive.

• Added function sha256sum() in package tools analogous to md5sum()
  implementing the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.

• The xtfrm() method for class "AsIs" is now considerably faster
  thanks to a patch provided by Ivan Krylov.

• The merge() method for data frames will no longer convert row
  names used for indexing using I(), which will lead to faster
  execution in cases where sort = TRUE and all.x and/or all.y are
  set to TRUE.

• The methods package internal function .requirePackage() now calls
  requireNamespace(p) instead of require(p), hence no longer adding
  packages to the search() path in cases methods or class
  definitions are needed. Consequently, previous workflows relying
  on the old behaviour will have to be amended by adding
  corresponding library(p) calls.

• More R-level messages use a common format containing "character
  string" for more consistency and less translation work.

• available.packages() and install.packages() get an optional
  switch cache_user_dir, somewhat experimentally.

• The sunspot.month data have been updated to Oct 2024; because of
  recalibration also historical numbers are changed, and we keep
  the previous data as sunspot.m2014 for reproducibility.

• The quartz() device now supports alpha masks. Thanks to George
  Stagg, Gwynn Gebeyhu, Heather Turner, and Tomek Gieorgijewski.

• The print() method for date-time objects (POSIX.t) gets an
  optional digits argument for fractional seconds, passed to
  improved format.POSIXlt(); consequently, print(<date.time>, digits = n) allows to print fractions of seconds.

• install.packages() and download.packages() download packages
  simultaneously using libcurl, significantly reducing download
  times when installing or downloading multiple packages.

• Status reporting in download.file() has been extended to report
  the outcome for individual files in simultaneous downloads.

• The Rd \link macro now allows markup in the link text when the
  topic is given by the optional argument, e.g.,
  \link[=gamma]{\eqn{\Gamma(x)}}.

• If La_library() is empty, sessionInfo() still reports
  La_version() when available.

• seq.int(from, to, by, ....) when |by| = 1 now behaves as if by
  was omitted, and hence returns from:to, possibly integer.

• seq.Date(from, to, by, ....) and seq.POSIXt(..) now also work
  when from is missing and sufficient further arguments are
  provided, thanks to Michael Chirico's report, patch proposal in
  PR#17672 and ‘R Dev Day’ contributions.

  The Date method also works for seq(from, to), when by is missing
  and now defaults to "1 days".

  It is now documented (and tested) that the by string may be
  abbreviated in both seq methods.

  Both methods return or keep internal type "integer" more
  consistently now. Also, as.POSIXct({}) is internally integer.

• duplicated(), unique(), and anyDuplicated() now also work for
  class expression vectors.

• New function use() to use packages in R scripts with full control
  over what gets added to the search path. (Actually already
  available since R 4.4.0.)

• There is some support for zstd compression of tarballs in tar()
  and untar(). (This depends on OS support of libzstd or by tar.)

• print(summary(<numbers>)) gets new optional argument zdigits to
  allow more flexible and consistent (double) rounding. The
  current default zdigits = 4L is somewhat experimental.
  Specifying both digits = *, zdigits = * allows behaviour
  independent of the global digits option.

• The format() method for "difftime" objects gets a new back
  compatible option with.units.

• A summary() method for "difftime" objects which prints nicely,
  similar to those for "Date" and "POSIXct".

• unique()'s default method now also deals with "difftime" objects.

• optimize(f, *) when f(x) is not finite says more about the value
  in its warning message. It no longer replaces -Inf by the
  largest positive finite number.

• The documentation of gamma() and is.numeric() is more specific,
  thanks to the contributors of PR#18677.

• New dataset gait thanks to Heather Turner and Ella Kaye, used in
  examples.

• New datasets penguins and penguins_raw thanks to Ella Kaye,
  Heather Turner, and Kristen Gorman.

• isSymmetric(<matrix>) gains a new option trans = "C"; when set to
  non-default, it tests for “simple” symmetry of complex matrices.

• model.frame() produces more informative error messages in some
  cases when variables in the formula are not found, thanks to Ben
  Bolker's PR#18860.

• selectMethod(f, ..) now keeps the function name if the function
  belongs to a group generic and the method is for the generic.

BLAS and LAPACK:

• The bundled BLAS and LAPACK sources have been updated to those
  shipped as part of January 2025's LAPACK 3.12.1.

• It is intended that this will be the last update to BLAS and
  LAPACK in the R sources. Those building R from source are
  encouraged to use external BLAS and LAPACK and this will be
  required in future.

• This update was mainly bug fixes but contained a barely
  documented major change. The set of BLAS routines had been
  unchanged since 1988, so throughout R's history. This update
  introduced new BLAS routines dgemmtr and zgemmtr which are now
  used by LAPACK routines. This means that BLAS implementations
  are no longer interchangeable.

• To work around this, R can be configured with option
  --with-2025blas which arranges for the 2025 BLAS additions to be
  compiled into libRlapack (the internal LAPACK, not built if an
  external LAPACK is used).

  This option allows the continuation of the practice of swapping
  the BLAS in use by symlinking lib/libRblas.*. It has the
  disadvantage of using the reference BLAS version of the 2025
  routines whereas an enhanced BLAS might have an optimized version
  (OpenBLAS does as from version 0.3.29).

• Windows builds currently use the internal LAPACK and by default
  the internal BLAS: notes on how to swap the latter via
  Rblas.dll are in file src/extra/blas/Makefile.win.

INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:

• A C23 compiler (if available) is now selected by default for
  compilation of R and packages. R builds can opt out via the
  configure flag --without-C23, unless the specified or default
  (usually gcc) compiler defaults to C23: gcc 15 will.

  A C23 compiler is known to be selected with gcc 13-15, LLVM clang
  18-20 (and 15 should), Apple clang 15-17 and Intel 2024.2-2025.0
  (and 2022.2 should).

  Current binary distributions on macOS use Apple clang 14 and so
  do not use C23.

• The minimum autoconf requirement for a maintainer build has been
  increased to autoconf 2.72.

• Building the HTML and Inf...

R 4.4.3

CHANGES IN R 4.4.3

INSTALLATION:

• R can be installed using C23 (for example with -std=gnu23 or
  -std=gnu2x) with recent compilers including gcc 12-14, Apple
  clang 15-16, LLVM clang 17-20 and Intel icx 2024.2.

  It can be installed with the upcoming (at the time of writing)
  gcc 15, which defaults to C23.

C-LEVEL FACILITIES:

• The functions R_strtod and R_atof now allow hexadecimal constants
  without an exponent, for compatibility with their C99 versions
  (PR#18805).

UTILITIES:

• R CMD build and R CMD check now allow reference output for demo
  scripts (demo/<demo>.Rout.save files) to be shipped with the
  package, as proposed by Torsten Hothorn in PR#18816.

BUG FIXES:

• kappa(A, exact=TRUE) for singular A returns Inf more generally,
  fixing PR#18817 reported by Mikael Jagan.

• Fixed URLs of the sun spots (sunspot.month etc) data sets and
  mention future changes due to recalibration.

• The parser now accepts hexadecimal constants with a decimal point
  without an exponent (taken as p0) as documented in
  ?NumericConstants (PR#18819).

• rbind() now works correctly when inputs include a raw vector and
  a logical, integer or double vector - previously the inclusion of
  the latter was garbled.

• smooth.spline() checks validity of its arguments df.offset and
  penalty: it could segfault if they were NULL.

• isGeneric(<primitive>, fdef=*, getName=TRUE) now also returns the
  name instead of just TRUE, fixing PR#18829 reported by Mikael
  Jagan.

• isGeneric(fdef = print) now works, fixing PR#18369 thanks to
  Mikael Jagan.

• sort(x, method = "qsort") made illegal accesses when x has length
  0.

• dir.create() is protected against being passed an empty string as
  its path argument.

• Silent integer overflow could occur in the 'exact' computations
  for fisher.test() for unrealistic inputs: this is now an error.

• Some invalid C-level memory accesses are avoided for loglin(, margin = NULL).

  loglin(, param = TRUE) no longer gives an error in corner cases
  such as a one-dimensional input.

• dev.capabilities()$events now reports "Idle" if the device
  provides it, fixing PR#18836, thanks to Trevor Davis.

• arima(.., seasonal = <wrong-vector>) correctly errors now, ditto
  for arima0(), thanks to Norbert Kuder's report on the R-devel
  list.

• binomial(<link>)$linkinv(eta) and .. $mu.eta(eta) now also work
  for "logit" link when is.integer(eta).

• as.roman(x) now should work platform independently, also for,
  e.g., x = "IIIII" (= V) and x = "IIIIII" (= VI).

• R CMD Rd2pdf works again on an installed package directory
  containing LaTeX help (from option --latex), thanks to a report
  by Peter Ruckdeschel.

4.4.2

CHANGES IN R 4.4.2

C-LEVEL FACILITIES:

• The S-compatibility macros F77_COM and F77_COMDECL defined in
  header R_ext/RS.h are deprecated and will be removed shortly. We
  could find no record of their use.

BUG FIXES:

• Mathlib function lgammacor(x) no longer warns about underflow to
  zero for large x.

• Text widths and heights were incorrectly reported by the Quartz
  device if the drawing context didn't exist yet (typically when
  drawing off-screen to a window that is yet to appear, see
  PR#18591).

• The Quartz device could segfault in cases where paths with spaces
  are used in the new glyph drawing API. Thanks to Tomek
  Gieorgijewski (PR#18758).

• On macOS in R CRAN builds, it is again possible to read
  little-endian UTF-16 text with a BOM from a connection using
  encoding="UTF-16". Users building R from source should avoid
  using the system libiconv in macOS 14.1 and later.

• methods' internal .requirePackage() now re-enables primitive
  method dispatch when needed; thanks to Ivan Krylov for
  demystifying CRAN package check failures on the R-devel mailing
  list.

R 4.4.1

CHANGES IN R 4.4.1

C-LEVEL FACILITIES:

• Functions R_atof and R_strtod declared in header R_ext/Utils.h
  are now documented in 'Writing R Extensions' and so formally part
  of the API.

• The non-API entry points Rf_setSVector, Rf_StringFalse,
  Rf_StringTrue and Rf_isBlankString have been added to those
  reported by R CMD check.

• The new function Rf_allocLang is now available. This provides an
  alternative to the idiom of calling Rf_allocList followed by
  SET_TYPEOF.

UTILITIES:

• R CMD check now reports as warnings what gfortran calls 'Fortran
  2018 deleted features', all of which have long been marked as
  'obsolescent' and some of which were deleted in Fortran 2008 or
  earlier. Fortran compilers are no longer required to support
  these.

BUG FIXES:

• as.numeric(), scan(), type.convert() and other places which use
  the internal C function R_strtod now require a non-empty digit
  sequence in a decimal or binary exponent. This aligns with the
  C/POSIX standard for strtod and with ?NumericConstants.

• as.data.frame(m, make.names=NA) now works correctly for a matrix
  m with NA's in row names.

• The error message from <POSIXlt>[["hour"]] and similar now
  mentions *[[, "hour"]], as wished for in [PR#17409](https://bugs.r-project.or\
  g/show_bug.cgi?id=17409) and proposed by
  Michael Chirico.

• qbinom() and potentially qpois(), qnbinom(), no longer sometimes
  fail accurate inversion (of pbinom(), etc), thanks to Christopher
  Chang's report and patch in [PR#18711](https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cg\
  i?id=18711).

• The internal help server on Windows can again serve requests sent
  in quick succession, fixing a regression in R 4.4.0.

• debugcall(<S3Generic>()) now also works when a corresponding
  S4-generic version is in the methods cache ([PR#18143](https://bugs.r-project\
  .org/show_bug.cgi?id=18143)).

• Package tools' toTitleCase(ch0) now returns character(0) when ch0
  is of zero length; fixing [PR#18724](https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?\
  id=18724), reported by David Hugh Jones.

• R CMD check is no longer broken (without a check result and no
  explanation in 00check.log) for a package which declares an
  invalid VignetteBuilder in DESCRIPTION but has no vignettes.

R 4.4.0

CHANGES IN R 4.4.0

SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:

• Startup banners, R --version, sessionInfo() and R CMD check no
  longer report (64-bit) as part of the platform as this is almost
  universal - the increasingly rare 32-bit platforms will still
  report (32-bit).

  On Windows, ditto for window titles.

• is.atomic(NULL) now returns FALSE, as NULL is not an atomic
  vector. Strict back-compatibility would replace is.atomic(foo)
  by (is.null(foo) || is.atomic(foo)) but should happen only
  sparingly.

NEW FEATURES:

• The confint() methods for "glm" and "nls" objects have been
  copied to the stats package. Previously, they were stubs which
  called versions in package MASS. The MASS namespace is no longer
  loaded if you invoke (say) confint(glmfit). Further, the "glm"
  method for profile() and the plot() and pairs() methods for class
  "profile" have been copied from MASS to stats. (profile.nls()
  and plot.profile.nls() were already in stats.)

• The confint() and profile() methods for "glm" objects have gained a
  possibility to do profiling based on the Rao Score statistic in
  addition to the default Likelihood Ratio. This is controlled by a
  new test = argument.

• The pairs() method for "profile" objects has been extended with a
  which = argument to allow plotting only a subset of the
  parameters.

• The "glm" method for anova() computes test statistics and
  p-values by default, using a chi-squared test or an F test
  depending on whether the dispersion is fixed or free. Test
  statistics can be suppressed by giving argument test a false
  logical value.

• In setRepositories() the repositories can be set using their
  names via name = instead of index ind =.

• methods() and .S3methods() gain a all.names option for the (rare)
  case where functions starting with a . should be included.

• Serializations can now be interrupted (e.g., by Ctrl-C on a
  Unix-alike) if they take too long, e.g., from save.image(),
  thanks to suggestions by Ivan Krylov and others on R-devel.

• New startup option --max-connections to set the maximum number of
  simultaneous connections for the session. Defaults to 128 as
  before: allowed values up to 4096 (but resource limits may in
  practice restrict to smaller values).

• R on Windows (since Windows 10 2004) now uses the new Segment
  Heap allocator. This may improve performance of some
  memory-intensive applications.

• When R packages are built, typically by R CMD build <pkg>, the
  new --user=<build_user> option overrides the (internally
  determined) user name, currently Sys.info()["user"] or LOGNAME.
  This is a (modified) fulfillment of Will Landau's suggestion in
  PR#17530.

• tools::testInstalledBasic() gets new optional arguments outDir
  and testSrcdir, e.g., allowing to use it in a <builddir> != <srcdir> setup, and in standard "binary" Windows installation
  if a source tests/ folder is present.

• range(<DT_with_Inf>, finite = TRUE) now work for objects of class
  "Date", "POSIXct", and "POSIXlt" with infinite entries,
  analogously to range.default(), as proposed by Davis Vaughan on
  R-devel. Other range()-methods can make use of new function
  .rangeNum().

• New .internalGenerics object complementing .S3PrimitiveGenerics,
  for documentation and low-level book-keeping.

• grid() now invisibly returns the x- and y- coordinates at which
  the grid-lines were drawn.

• norm(., type) now also works for complex matrices.

• kappa(., exact = TRUE, norm = *) now works for all norms and also
  for complex matrices. In symmetric / triangular cases, the new
  argument uplo = "U" | uplo = "L" allows the upper or lower triangular
  part to be specified.

• memDecompress(type = "unknown") recognizes compression in the
  default 'zlib' format as used by memCompress(type = "gzip").

• memCompress() and memDecompress() will use the libdeflate library
  (https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate) if installed. This
  uses the same type of compression for type = "gzip" but is 1.5-2x
  faster than the system libz library on some common platforms: the
  speed-up may depend on the library version.

• diff() for objects of class "Date", "POSIXct", and "POSIXlt"
  accepts a units argument passed via ....

• Dynamic help now does a much better job of rendering package
  DESCRIPTION metadata.

• Rprof() gains an event argument and support for elapsed (real)
  time profiling on Unix (PR#18076).

• filled.contour() gains a key.border argument.

• tools::update_pkg_po() gets arguments pot_make and mo_make for
  not re-making the corresponding files, and additionally a
  verbose argument.

• Hexadecimal string colour specifications are now accepted in
  short form, so, for example, we can use "#123", which is
  equivalent to "#112233".

  Thanks to MikeFC for the original idea and Ella Kaye, Malcolm
  Barrett, George Stagg, and Hanne Oberman for the patch.

• Plain-text help shows \var markup by angle brackets.

• The new experimental primitive function declare() is intended to
  eventually allow information about R code to be communicated to
  the interpreter, compiler, and code analysis tools. The syntax
  for declarations is still being developed.

• Functions psmirnov(), qsmirnov() and rsmirnov() in package stats
  have had argument two.sided renamed to alternative, to take into
  account that the permutation distributions of the one-sided
  statistics can be different in the case of ties. Consequence of
  PR#18582.

• sort() is now an implicit S4 generic in methods.

• Formatting and printing, format(z), print(z), of complex vectors
  z no longer zap relatively small real or imaginary parts to zero,
  fixing PR#16752. This is an API change, as it was documented
  previously to round real and imaginary parts together on purpose,
  producing nicer looking output. As mentioned, e.g. in the PR,
  this change is compatible with many other "R-like" programming
  environments.

  We have simplified the internal code and now basically format the
  real and imaginary parts independently of each other.

• New experimental functions Tailcall() and Exec() to support
  writing stack-space-efficient recursive functions.

• Where characters are attempted to be plotted by pdf(),
  postscript() and xfig() which are not in the selected 8-bit
  character set (most often Latin-1) and the R session is using a
  UTF-8 locale, the warning messages will show the UTF-8 character
  rather than its bytes and one dot will be substituted per
  character rather than per byte. (Platforms whose iconv() does
  transliteration silently plot the transliteration.)

  In a UTF-8 locale some transliterations are now done with a
  warning (e.g., dashes and Unicode minus to hyphen, ligatures are
  expanded, permille (‰) is replaced by o/oo), although the OS may
  have got there first. These are warnings as they will continue
  to be replaced by dots in earlier versions of R.

• The matrix multiplication functions crossprod() and tcrossprod()
  are now also primitive and S3 generic, as %*% had become in R
  4.3.0.

• source() and example() have a new optional argument catch.aborts
  which allows continued evaluation of the R code after an error.

• The non-Quartz tiff() devices allow additional types of
  compression if supported by the platform's libtiff library.

• The list of base and recommended package names is now provided by
  tools::standard_package_names().

• cairo_pdf() and cairo_ps() default to onefile = TRUE to closer
  match pdf() and postscript().

• New option catch.script.errors provides a documented way to catch
  errors and then continue in non-interactive use.

• L %||% R newly in base is an expressive idiom for the phrases
  if(!is.null(L)) L else R or if(is.null(L)) R else L.

• The return value from warnings() now always inherits from
  "warnings" as documented, now also in the case of no warnings
  where it previously returned NULL.

• as.complex("1i") now returns 0 + 1i instead of NA with a warning.

• z <- c(NA, 1i) now keeps the imaginary part Im(z[1]) == 0, no
  longer coercing to NA_complex_. Similarly, cumsum(z) correctly
  sums real and imaginary parts separately, i.e., without
  "crosstalk" in case of NAs.

• On Alpine Linux iconv() now maps "latin2", "latin-2", "latin9"
  and "latin-9" to encoding names the OS knows about
  (case-insensitively).

• iconv(sub = "Unicode") now always zero-pads to four (hex) digits,
  rather than to 4 or 8. (This seems to have become the convention
  once Unicode restricted the number of Unicode points to 2^21 - 1
  and so will never need more than 6 digits.)

• NCOL(NULL) now returns 0 instead of 1, for consistency with
  cbind().

• The information for the Euro glyph missing from the Adobe .afm
  files for the Courier, Helvetica and Times families has been
  copied from their URW equivalents - this will improve vertical
  centring in the pdf() and postscript() devices.

• The included BLAS sources have been updated to those shipped with
  LAPACK version 3.12.0. The changes are almost entirely cosmetic.

• The included LAPACK sources have been updated to version 3.12.0
  and some further double-complex routines added.

• There are new font families for the 2014--5 URW 2.0 fonts (see
  ?pdf) which are included in recent versions of Ghostscript.
  These have font widths for most Greek glyphs and ...