Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes Changed ‘model.frame.glm()’ to use same logic as ‘model.frame.lm()’ (PR#19036, Isaac Gravestock). Fix cases where ‘M’ and ‘X’ matrices could be spanning the same subspace in ‘mauchly.test()’, ‘sphericity()’ ‘anova.mlm()’, ‘anova.mlmlist()’. (PR#16166, originally reported in 2015 by Florent Aubry, essentially analyzed Feb. 2020 just before the corona crisis, triaged 202…
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes Fix cases where ‘M’ and ‘X’ matrices could be spanning the same subspace in ‘mauchly.test()’, ‘anova.mlm’, ‘anova.mlmlist’. (PR#16166, originally reported in 2015 by Florent Aubry, essentially analyzed Feb. 2020 just before the corona crisis, triaged 2026 by Michael Chirico)
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes In ‘nls’, follow suggestion by Ben Bolker to reorder named vectors for ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ arguments to match names of the starting values (PR#18415). This has been extended so that you can now specify _only_ the parameters that you wish to constrain, and also so that it works when parameters are in the form of named lists.
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes ‘dummy.coef()’ becomes more robust to non-syntactic variable names, fixing PR#18468. Thanks to Bill Dunlap and ‘R Dev Day’ participants Vincent Arel-Bundock, Cynthia Huang, Tina Rozsos and Marina Marinelli. Changes in R 4.6.1 patched Bug Fixes ‘dummy.coef()’ becomes more robust to non-syntactic variable names, fixing PR#18468. Thanks to Bill Dunlap and ‘R Dev Day’ part…
Changes in R 4.6.1 patched Bug Fixes ‘dim(a) <- vec’ now checks for too large ‘prod(vec)’, thanks to Kevin Ushey's report and patch in PR#19109.
Changes in R 4.6.1 patched Bug Fixes ‘writeChar()’ in a multibyte locale counts characters and bytes consistently and no longer overflows, thanks to Kevin Ushey's report and patch in PR#19112.
Changes in R 4.6.1 patched Bug Fixes Now ‘PROTECT()’ in ‘SubassignTypeFix’, fixing PR#19110 thanks to Kevin Ushey.
Changes in R-devel New Features New higher-order functions ‘Compose()’, ‘Funcall()’ and ‘Partial()’. New functions ‘find_calls()’, ‘find_calls_in_package_code()’, ‘gsub_with_transformed_matches()’ and ‘system_with_capture()’ in package ‘tools’. Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes Fix segfault in ‘postscript()’ and ‘pdf()’ if set ‘papersize’ option to very long string (PR#19108). Thanks to Kevin Ushey. Fi…
Changes in R-devel New Features ‘use()’ gets an argument ‘pos’ with a help example showing how to attach a “chain” of packages to ‘search()’.
Changes in R 4.6.1 patched Bug Fixes Wrappers now duplicate even a wrapped object that might be shared before returning a read-only pointer. This prevents cached read-only pointers from becoming invalid. Reported by Ivan Krylov. Wrapper objects make sure data pointers remain once obtained remain valid as long as a wrapper object is reachable. Reported by Ivan Krylov.
Changes in R-devel Significant User-Visible Changes Fixing ‘rbinom()’, see PR#19049 below, to reproduce old results needs ‘RNGkind()’ to get a new ‘binom.kind’ argument and, e.g. ‘RNGversion("4.6")’ keeps previous behaviour. Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes ‘rbinom()’'s BTPE algorithm is fixed thanks to Kate Hudson's findings and report in PR#19049. To ensure reproducibility, ‘RNGkind()’ gets new argu…
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes Package ‘methods’ provides a method for implicit generic function ‘rcond’ with signature ‘c(x="ANY", norm="missing")’ so that ‘rcond(x)’ does not break after ‘setGeneric("rcond")’.
Changes in R-devel New Features New low-level function ‘.OBJSXP()’ enables deparsing of non-S4 ‘"object"’ type objects. Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes In ‘methods’, ‘as()’ now correctly coerces S4 objects to S4 superclasses extending old-style classes, instead of returning only the S3 part. ‘dummy.coef()’ becomes more robust to non-syntactic variable names, fixing PR#18468. Thanks to Bill Dunlap and…
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes Fix for PR#19100: ‘seq.int’ was not handling non-vector ‘along.width’ arguments properly. Thanks to Mitchell O'Hara-Wild. Changes in R 4.6.1 patched Bug Fixes Fix for PR#19100: ‘seq.int’ was not handling non-vector ‘along.width’ arguments properly. Thanks to Mitchell O'Hara-Wild. Wrappers now duplicate even a wrapped object that might be shared before returning a read-…
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes ‘summary(<aov>)’ for an almost perfect fit now warns analogously to ‘summary(<lm>)’, using the same check. Fixes fixes PR#18341 thanks to R Dev Day members Deepansh Khurana, Stefan Linner and Oscar de Leon.
Changes in R-devel Utilities ‘R CMD build’ now excludes an obsolete ‘data/datalist’ file when the package uses ‘LazyData’. ‘tools::texi2pdf()’ now reports BibTeX warnings; in particular, missing references are now noted by ‘R CMD check’ when re-building PDF vignettes. Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes In ‘nls’, follow suggestion by Ben Bolker to reorder named vectors for ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ arguments t…
Changes in R 4.6.1 patched Bug Fixes ‘rhyper(N, m, n, k)’ now switches to the “large” scenario when ‘m + n’ is larger than ‘.Machine$integer.max’, preventing integer overflow, thanks to Jonathan Blood's report on R-devel.
Changes in R-devel Deprecated and Defunct ‘structure()’ now deprecates the old “special” substitute ‘attributes’' names ‘".Dim", ".Dimnames", ".Names", ".Tsp", ".Label"’ in favour of the respective ‘"dim", "dimnames", "names", "tsp", "levels"’ names.
Changes in R-devel Utilities ‘tools::texi2pdf()’ now reports BibTeX warnings.
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes ‘cor(*, method="kendall")’ and ‘cov()’ now use the fast N*log(N) algorithm suggested in PR#18934 and offered by David Simcha on R-devel in 2010. With thanks to the R Dev Day @ Nantes 2026 contributors, notably Charles Bordet and Alexis Derumigny.
Changes in R-devel Significant User-Visible Changes ‘read.dcf()’ and ‘write.dcf()’ now treat DCF files (such as package ‘DESCRIPTION’ and repository ‘PACKAGES’ files) as UTF-8, as required by the Debian control file format. ‘read.dcf()’ returns values in UTF-8 and ‘write.dcf()’ always writes UTF-8 regardless of the session locale; bytes which are not valid UTF-8 are preserved by escaping them as ‘…
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes Fix for PR#19094; fill/stroke path based on text with ‘col=NA’. Thanks to Trevor Davis. Fix for PR#18842; better documentation and warnings when specify inappropriate ‘col’ to ‘filled.contour()’. Thanks to Darakhshan Nehal.
Changes in R 4.6.1 patched Bug Fixes In plain-text help (‘Rd2txt’), paragraphs are again recognized even when started with a non-indented Rd comment, fixing a regression in R 4.4.0.
Changes in R-devel New Features ‘binom.test()’ and ‘poisson.test()’ can now at least optionally compute central two-sided p-values which match the confidence intervals. Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes In ‘methods’, ‘setOldClass(..., S4Class = )’ no longer warns about undefined subclasses when the supplied S4 class inherits from a class union. Changes in R 4.6.1 Bug Fixes Fix long standing (Fortran co…
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes ‘trace()’ now works for functions whose S3 class attribute has more than one string, e.g., ‘S7’ generics and methods. Thanks to Hadley Wickham for the patch. ‘as(object, to) <- value’ no longer treats ‘to’ as a class union when it was registered via ‘setOldClass()’.
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes ‘merge.data.frame’ now returns the correct column names when at least one of the merged data frames has zero rows and at least one of the merged data frames has only one column, fixing PR#18930. Thanks to David Molnar and Gabriel Becker. Changes in R 4.6.1 Bug Fixes Fix long standing (fortran compiler optimization related) bug in ‘nlminb’ with constraints, thanks to Ka…
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes 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. Fix for PR#18874; ‘"null"’ widths/heights in ‘grid’ layouts are zero if widths/heights to allocate are zero. (Thanks to Maciej Nasinski and Trevor Davis.) Fix for PR#19055; additional documentation for ‘embedFonts()’. (Th…
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). Changes in R 4.6.1 Bug Fixes ‘abbreviate(<non-ASCII>)’ now works better, using ‘iswlower()’ and…
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes 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). ‘strat_ratio != 1’ in ‘rfree1way’ did not work as advertised. Zeros in ‘prob’ argument to ‘power.free1way.test’ triggered an error and are now hand…
Changes in R-devel Bug Fixes Exclude patterns from ‘.Rbuildignore’ are now processed _before_ preparing the package directory for the tarball, avoiding redundant file copies from the source directory (PR#17549). In particular, when a source package ‘foo/’ folder contains broken symlinks matching an exclude pattern, ‘R CMD build foo’ now succeeds, omitting these, thus fixing PR#18186. (Thanks to Iv…