@r-universe/webr 2023.6.11 → 2023.6.21

package/dist/vfs/usr/lib/R/doc/NEWS

@@ -0,0 +1,3538 @@
+R News
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.3.0:
+
+  SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:
+
+    * Calling && or || with LHS or (if evaluated) RHS of length greater
+      than one is now always an error, with a report of the form
+
+          'length = 4' in coercion to 'logical(1)'
+      
+      Environment variable _R_CHECK_LENGTH_1_LOGIC2_ no longer has any
+      effect.
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * The included BLAS sources have been updated to those shipped with
+      LAPACK version 3.10.1.  (This caused some platform-dependent
+      changes to package check output.)  And then to the sources from
+      LAPACK version 3.11.0 (with changes only to double complex
+      subroutines).
+
+    * The included LAPACK sources have been updated to include the four
+      Fortran 90 routines rather than their Fortran 77 predecessors.
+      This may give some different signs in SVDs or
+      eigendecompositions..  (This completes the transition to LAPACK
+      3.10.x begun in R 4.2.0.)
+
+    * The LAPACK sources have been updated to version 3.11.0.  (No new
+      subroutines have been added, so this almost entirely bug fixes:
+      Those fixes do affect some computations with NaNs, including R's
+      NA.)
+
+    * The parser now signals _classed_ errors, notably in case of the
+      pipe operator |>.  The error object and message now give line and
+      column numbers, mostly as proposed and provided by Duncan Murdoch
+      in PR#18328.
+
+    * toeplitz() is now generalized for asymmetric cases, with a
+      toeplitz2() variant.
+
+    * xy.coords() and xyz.coords() and consequently, e.g., plot(x,y,
+      log = "y") now signal a _classed_ warning about negative values
+      of y (where log(.) is NA).  Such a warning can be specifically
+      suppressed or caught otherwise.
+
+    * Regular expression functions now check more thoroughly whether
+      their inputs are valid strings (in their encoding, e.g. in
+      UTF-8).
+
+    * The performance of grep(), sub(), gsub() and strsplit() has been
+      improved, particularly with perl = TRUE and fixed = TRUE.  Use of
+      useBytes = TRUE for performance reasons should no longer be
+      needed and is discouraged: it may lead to incorrect results.
+
+    * apropos() gains an argument dot_internals which is used by the
+      completion (help(rcompgen)) engine to also see base internals
+      such as .POSIXct().
+
+    * Support in tools::Rdiff() for comparing uncompressed PDF files is
+      further reduced - see its help page.
+
+    * qqplot(x, y, ...) gains conf.level and conf.args arguments for
+      computing and plotting a confidence band for the treatment
+      function transforming the distribution of x into the distribution
+      of y (Switzer, 1976, _Biometrika_). Contributed by Torsten
+      Hothorn.
+
+    * Performance of package_dependencies() has been improved for cases
+      when the number of dependencies is large.
+
+    * Strings newly created by gsub(), sub() and strsplit(), when any
+      of the inputs is marked as "bytes", are also marked as "bytes".
+      This reduces the risk of creating invalid strings and accidental
+      substitution of bytes deemed invalid.
+
+    * Support for readLines(encoding = "bytes") has been added to allow
+      processing special text files byte-by-byte, without creating
+      invalid strings.
+
+    * iconv(from = "") now takes into account any declared encoding of
+      the input elements and uses it in preference to the native
+      encoding.  This reduces the risk of accidental creation of
+      invalid strings, particularly when different elements of the
+      input have different encoding (including "bytes").
+
+    * Package repositories in getOption("repos") are now initialized
+      from the repositories file when utils is loaded (if not already
+      set, e.g., in .Rprofile).  (From a report and patch proposal by
+      Gabriel Becker in PR#18405.)
+
+    * compactPDF() gets a verbose option.
+
+    * type.convert() and hence read.table() get new option tryLogical =
+      TRUE with back compatible default.  When set to false, converts
+      "F" or "T" columns to character.
+
+    * Added new unit prefixes "R" and "Q" for abbreviating
+      (unrealistically large) sizes beyond 10^{27} in standard = "SI",
+      thanks to Henrik Bengtsson's PR#18435.
+
+    * as.data.frame()'s default method now also works fine with atomic
+      objects inheriting from classes such as "roman", "octmode" and
+      "hexmode", such fulfilling the wish of PR#18421, by Benjamin
+      Feakins.
+
+    * The as.data.frame.vector() utility now errors for wrong-length
+      row.names.  It warned for almost six years, with "Will be an
+      error!".
+
+    * sessionInfo() now also contains La_version() and reports codepage
+      and timezone when relevant, in both print() and toLatex() methods
+      which also get new option tzone for displaying timezone
+      information when locale = FALSE.
+
+    * New function R_compiled_by() reports the C and Fortran compilers
+      used to build R, if known.
+
+    * predict(<lm>, newdata = *) no longer unnecessarily creates an
+      offset of all 0s.
+
+    * solve() for complex inputs now uses argument tol and by default
+      checks for 'computational singularity' (as it long has done for
+      numeric inputs).
+
+    * predict(<rank-deficient lm>, newdata=*) now obeys a new argument
+      rankdeficient, with new default "warnif", warning only if there
+      are non-estimable cases in newdata.  Other options include
+      rankdeficient = "NA", predicting NA for non-estimable newdata
+      cases.  This addresses PR#15072 by Russ Lenth and is based on his
+      original proposal and discussions in PR#16158 also by David Firth
+      and Elin Waring.  Still somewhat experimental.
+
+    * Rgui console implementation now works better with the NVDA screen
+      reader when the full blinking cursor is selected.  The underlying
+      improvements in cursor handling may help also other screen
+      readers on Windows.
+
+    * The drop-field control in GraphApp can now be left with the TAB
+      key and all controls can be navigated in the reverse order using
+      the Shift+TAB key, improving accessibility of the Rgui
+      configuration editor.
+
+    * qnorm(<very large negative>, log.p=TRUE) is now fully accurate
+      (instead of to "only" minimally five digits).
+
+    * demo(error.catching) now also shows off withWarnings() and
+      tryCatchWEMs().
+
+    * As an experimental feature the placeholder _ can now also be used
+      in the rhs of a forward pipe |> expression as the first argument
+      in an extraction call, such as _$coef. More generally, it can be
+      used as the head of a chain of extractions, such as _$coef[[2]].
+
+    * Spaces in the environment variable used to choose the R session's
+      temporary directory (TMPDIR, TMP and TEMP are tried in turn) are
+      now fatal.  (On Windows the 'short path' version of the path is
+      tried and used if that does not contain a space.)
+
+    * all.equal.numeric() gets a new optional switch giveErr to return
+      the numeric error as attribute.  Relatedly,
+      stopifnot(all.equal<some>(a, b, ..)) is as "smart" now, as
+      stopifnot(all.equal(....)) has been already, thus allowing
+      customized all.equal<Some>() wrappers.
+
+    * R on Windows is now able to work with path names longer than 260
+      characters when these are enabled in the system (requires at
+      least Windows 10 version 1607).  Packages should be updated to
+      work with long paths as well, instead of assuming PATH_MAX to be
+      the maximum length.  Custom front-ends and applications embedding
+      R need to update their manifests if they wish to allow this
+      feature.  See
+      <https://blog.r-project.org/2023/03/07/path-length-limit-on-windows>
+      for more information.
+
+    * 'Object not found' and 'Missing argument' errors now give a more
+      accurate error context. Patch provided by Lionel Henry in
+      PR#18241.
+
+    * The @ operator is now an S3 generic. Based on contributions by
+      Tomasz Kalinowski in PR#18482.
+
+    * New generic chooseOpsMethod() provides a mechanism for objects to
+      resolve cases where two suitable methods are found for an Ops
+      Group Generic. This supports experimenting with alternative
+      object systems. Based on contributions by Tomasz Kalinowski in
+      PR#18484.
+
+    * inherits(x, what) now accepts values other than a simple
+      character vector for argument what. A new generic, nameOfClass(),
+      is called to resolve the class name from what. This supports
+      experimenting with alternative object systems. Based on
+      contributions by Tomasz Kalinowski in PR#18485.
+
+    * Detection of BLAS/LAPACK in use (sessionInfo()) with FlexiBLAS
+      now reports the current backend.
+
+    * The "data.frame" method for subset() now warns about extraneous
+      arguments, typically catching the use of = instead of == in the
+      subset expression.
+
+    * Calling a:b when numeric a or b is longer than one may now be
+      made into an error by setting environment variable
+      _R_CHECK_LENGTH_COLON_ to a true value, along the proposal in
+      PR#18419 by Henrik Bengtsson.
+
+    * density(x, weights = *) now warns if automatic bandwidth
+      selection happens without using weights; new optional warnWbw may
+      suppress the warning.  Prompted by Christoph Dalitz' PR#18490 and
+      its discussants.
+
+    * rm(list = *) is faster and more readable thanks to Kevin Ushey's
+      PR#18492.
+
+    * The plot.lm() function no longer produces a normal Q-Q plot for
+      GLMs. Instead it plots a half-normal Q-Q plot of the absolute
+      value of the standardized deviance residuals.
+
+    * The print() method for class "summary.glm" no longer shows
+      summary statistics for the deviance residuals by default.  Its
+      optional argument show.residuals can be used to show them if
+      required.
+
+    * The tapply() function now accepts a data frame as its X argument,
+      and allows INDEX to be a formula in that case. by.data.frame()
+      similarly allows INDICES to be a formula.
+
+    * The performance of df[j] <- value (including for missing j) and
+      write.table(df) has been improved for data frames df with a large
+      number of columns.  (Thanks to Gabriel Becker's PR#18500,
+      PR#18503 and discussants, prompted by a report from Toby Dylan
+      Hocking on the R-devel mailing list.)
+
+    * The matrix multiply operator %*% is now an S3 generic, belonging
+      to new group generic matrixOps.  From Tomasz Kalinowski's
+      contribution in PR#18483.
+
+    * New function array2DF() to convert arrays to data frames,
+      particularly useful for the list arrays created by tapply().
+
+  DATES and TIMES:
+
+    * On platforms where (non-UTC) datetimes before 1902 (or before
+      1900 as with system functions on recent macOS) are guessed by
+      extrapolating time zones from 1902-2037, there is a warning at
+      the first use of extrapolation in a session.  (As all time zones
+      post 2037 are extrapolation, we do not warn on those.)
+
+    * (Platforms using --with-internal-tzone, including Windows and by
+      default macOS). How years are printed in dates or date-times can
+      be controlled by environment variable R_PAD_YEARS_BY_ZERO.  The
+      default remains to pad to 4 digits by zeroes, but setting value
+      no gives no padding (as used by default by glibc).
+
+    * strftime() tries harder to determine the offset for the "%z"
+      format, and succeeds on the mainstream R platforms.
+
+    * strftime() has a limit of 2048 bytes on the string produced -
+      attempting to exceed this is an error.  (Previously it silently
+      truncated at 255 bytes.)
+
+    * sessionInfo() records (and by default prints) the system time
+      zone as part of the locale information.  Also, the source
+      (system/internal) of the date-time conversion and printing
+      functions.
+
+    * Objects of class "POSIXlt" created in this version of R always
+      have 11 components: component zone is always set, and component
+      gmtoff is set for times in UTC and usually set on the (almost
+      all) platforms which have C-level support, otherwise is NA.
+
+    * There are comprehensive validity checks on the structure of
+      objects of class "POSIXlt" when converting (including formatting
+      and printing).  (This avoids mis-conversions of hand-crafted
+      objects.)
+
+    * There is some support for using the native date-time routines on
+      macOS: this is only viable on recent versions (e.g. 12.6 and 13)
+      and does get wrong some historical changes (before 1900, during
+      WWII).  Use of --with-internal-tzone remains the default.
+
+    * as.POSIXct(<numeric>) and as.POSIXlt(.) (without specifying
+      origin) now work.  So does as.Date(<numeric>).
+
+    * as.Date.POSIXct(., tz) now treats several tz values, notably
+      "GMT" as equivalent to "UTC", proposed and improved by Michael
+      Chirico and Joshua Ulrich in PR#17674.
+
+    * Experimental balancePOSIXlt() utility allows using "ragged" and
+      or out-of-range "POSIXlt" objects more correctly, e.g., in
+      subsetting and subassignments.  Such objects are now documented.
+
+      More experimentally, a "POSIXlt" object may have an attribute
+      "balanced" indicating if it is known to be filled or fully
+      balanced.
+
+    * Functions axis.Date() and axis.POSIXct() are rewritten to gain
+      better default tick locations and better default formats by using
+      prettyDate(). Thanks to Swetlana Herbrandt.
+
+    * The mapping of Windows' names for time zones to IANA's 'Olson'
+      names has been updated.  When ICU is available (it is by
+      default), it is used to get a mapping for the current region set
+      in Windows.  This can be overridden by setting environment
+      variable TZ to the desired Olson name - see OlsonNames() for
+      those currently available.
+
+  GRAPHICS:
+
+    * The graphics engine version, R_GE_version, has been bumped to 16
+      and so packages that provide graphics devices should be
+      reinstalled.
+
+    * The grDevices and grid packages have new functions for rendering
+      typeset glyphs, primarily: grDevices::glyphInfo() and
+      grid::grid.glyph().
+
+      Rendering of typeset glyphs is only supported so far on the
+      Cairo-based graphics devices and on the pdf() and quartz()
+      devices.
+
+    * The defined behaviour for "clear" and "source" compositing
+      operators (via grid::grid.group()) has been changed (to align
+      better with simple interpretation of original Porter-Duff
+      definitions).
+
+    * Support for gradients, patterns, clipping paths, masks, groups,
+      compositing operators, and affine transformations has been added
+      to the quartz() device.
+
+  INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:
+
+    * A system installation of generic LAPACK 3.10.0 or later will be
+      preferred to the version in the R sources.
+
+      configure option --with-lapack=no (equivalently --without-lapack)
+      forces compilation of the internal LAPACK sources.
+
+      If --with-lapack is not specified, a system liblapack is looked
+      for and used if it reports version 3.10.0 or later and does not
+      contain BLAS routines.
+
+      Packages using LAPACK will need to be reinstalled if this changes
+      to using an external library.
+
+    * On aarch64 Linux platforms using GCC, configure now defaults to
+      -fPIC (instead of -fpic), as desired in PR#18326.
+
+    * configure now checks conversion of datetimes between POSIXlt and
+      POSIXct around year 2020.  Failure (which has been seen on
+      platforms missing tzdata) is fatal.
+
+    * If configure option --with-valgrind-instrumentation is given
+      value 1 or 2, option --with-system-valgrind-headers is now the
+      default and ignored (with a warning).  It is highly recommended
+      that the system headers are installed alongside valgrind: they
+      are part of its packaging on some Linux distributions and
+      packaged separately (e.g. in the valgrind-devel RPM) on others.
+      configure will give a warning if they are not found.
+
+      The system headers will be required in a future release of R to
+      build with valgrind instrumentation.
+
+    * libcurl 8.x is now accepted by configure: despite a change in
+      major version number it changes neither API nor ABI.
+
+  INSTALLATION on WINDOWS:
+
+    * The makefiles and installer scripts for Windows have been
+      tailored to Rtools43, an update of the Rtools42 toolchain.  It is
+      based on gcc 12 and newer versions of MinGW-W64, binutils and
+      libraries.  At this time R-devel can still be built using
+      Rtools42 without changes, but when R-devel is installed via the
+      installer, it will by default look for Rtools43.
+
+    * Old make targets rsync-extsoft and 32-bit ones that are no longer
+      needed have been removed.
+
+    * Default builds (including for packages) no longer select C99.
+      Thus the C standard used is the default for the compiler, which
+      for the toolchain in Rtools43 is C17.  (This is consistent with
+      Unix builds.)
+
+  PACKAGE INSTALLATION:
+
+    * The default C++ standard has been changed to C++17 where
+      available (which it is on all currently checked platforms): if
+      not C++14 or C++11 is used if available otherwise C++ is not
+      supported.
+
+    * USE_FC_LEN_T is the default: this uses the correct
+      (compiler-dependent) prototypes for Fortran BLAS/LAPACK routines
+      called from C/C++, and requires adjustment of many such calls -
+      see 'Writing R Extensions' ?6.6.1.
+
+    * There is initial support for C++23 as several compilers are now
+      supporting -std=c++23 or -std=c++2b or similar.  As for C++20,
+      there no additional configure checks for C++23 features beyond a
+      check that the compiler reports a __cplusplus value greater than
+      that in the C++20 standard.  C++ feature tests should be used.
+
+    * There is support for a package to indicate the version of the C
+      standard which should be used to compile it, and for the
+      installing user to specify this.  In most cases R defaults to the
+      C compiler's default standard which is C17 (a `bug-fix' of C11) -
+      earlier versions of R or compilers may have defaulted to C99.
+
+      Current options are:
+
+      USE_C17 Use a standard that is at most C17.  The intention is to
+          allow legacy packages to still be installed when later C
+          standards become the default, including packages using new
+          keywords as identifiers or with K&R-style function
+          declarations.  This will use C17 if available, falling back
+          to C11.
+
+      USE_C90 Use the C90 (aka C89) standard.  (As that standard did
+          not require compilers to identify that version, all we can
+          verify is that the compiler does not claim to be using a
+          later standard.  It may accept C99 features - for example
+          clang accepts // to make comments.)
+
+      USE_C99 Use the C99 standard. This should be rarely needed - it
+          avoids the few new features of C11/C17 which can be useful if
+          a package assumes them if C17 is specified and they are not
+          implemented.
+
+      USE_C23 Use C23 (or in future, later).  Compiler/library support
+          for C23 is still being implemented, but LLVM clang from
+          15.0.0 and the upcoming GCC 13 have quite extensive support.
+
+      These can be specified as part of the SystemRequirements field in
+      the package's DESCRIPTION file or _via_ options --use-C17 and so
+      on of R CMD INSTALL and R CMD SHLIB.
+
+      For further details see "Writing R Extensions" ?1.2.5.
+
+    * (Windows) A src/Makefile.ucrt or src/Makefile.win file is now
+      included after R_HOME/etcR_ARCH/Makeconf and so no longer needs
+      to include that file itself.  Installation of a package with such
+      a file now uses a site Makevars file in the same way as a package
+      with a src/Makevars.win file would.
+
+    * configure is now passed crucial variables such as CC and CFLAGS
+      in its environment, as many packages were not setting them (as
+      documented in 'Writing R Extensions' ?1.2).
+
+      This has most effect where configure is used to compile parts of
+      the package - most often by cmake or libtool which obfuscate the
+      actual compile commands used.
+
+      Also used for configure.win and configure.ucrt on Windows.
+
+  FORTRAN FLAGS:
+
+    * The flag -fno-optimize-sibling-calls is no longer forced for
+      gfortran 7 and later.  It should no longer be needed now using
+      'hidden' character-length arguments when calling BLAS/LAPACK
+      routines from C/C++ is the default even for packages.  (Unless
+      perhaps packages call Fortran code from C/C++ without using R's
+      headers and without allowing for these arguments.)
+
+  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
+
+    * The deprecated S-compatibility macros DOUBLE_* in
+      R_ext/Constants.h (included by R.h) have been removed.
+
+    * The deprecated legacy typedefs of Sint and Sfloat in header R.h
+      are no longer defined, and that header no longer includes header
+      limits.h from C nor climits from C++.
+
+    * New macro CAD5R() is provided in Rinternals.h and used in a few
+      places in the R sources.
+
+    * ALTREP now supports VECSXP vectors. Contributed by Gabor Csardi
+      in PR#17620.
+
+    * The Rcomplex definition (in header R_ext/Complex.h) has been
+      extended to prevent possible mis-compilation when interfacing
+      with Fortran (PR#18430).  The new definition causes compiler
+      warnings with static initializers such as {1, 2}, which can be
+      changed to {.r=1, .i=2}.
+
+      Using the new definition from C++ depends on compiler extensions
+      supporting C features that have not been incorporated into the
+      C++ standards but are available in g++ and clang++: this may
+      result in C++ compiler warnings but these have been worked around
+      for recent versions of common compilers (GCC, Apple/LLVM clang,
+      Intel).
+
+      It is intended to change the inclusion of header R_ext/Complex.h
+      by other R headers, so C/C++ code files which make use of
+      Rcomplex should include that header explicitly.
+
+  UTILITIES:
+
+    * R CMD check does more checking of package .Rd files, warning
+      about invalid email addresses and (some) invalid URIs and noting
+      empty \item labels in description lists.
+
+    * R CMD check now also reports problems when reading package news
+      in md (file NEWS.md) and (optionally) plain text (file NEWS)
+      formats.
+
+    * _R_CHECK_TIMINGS_ defaults to a value from the environment even
+      for R CMD check --as-cran; this allows for exceptionally fast or
+      slow platforms.
+
+      It now applies to checking PDF and HTML versions of the manuals,
+      and 'checking CRAN incoming feasibility'.
+
+    * R CMD check can optionally (but included in --as-cran) check
+      whether HTML math rendering _via_ KaTeX works for the package .Rd
+      files.
+
+    * Non-interactive debugger invocations can be trapped by setting
+      the environment variable _R_CHECK_BROWSER_NONINTERACTIVE_ to a
+      true value.  This is enabled by R CMD check --as-cran to detect
+      the use of leftover browser() statements in the package.
+
+    * The use of sprintf and vsprintf from C/C++ has been deprecated in
+      macOS 13 and is a known security risk.  R CMD check now reports
+      (on all platforms) if their use is found in compiled code:
+      replace by snprintf or vsnprintf respectively. [*NB:* whether
+      such calls get compiled into the package is platform-dependent.]
+
+    * Where recorded at installation, R CMD check reports the C and
+      Fortran compilers used to build R.
+
+      It reports the OS in use (if known, as given by osVersion) as
+      well as that R was built for.
+
+      It notes if a C++ standard was specified which is older than the
+      current default: many packages have used C++11 to mean 'not
+      C++98' - as C++11 is the minimum supported since R 4.0.0, that
+      specification can probably be removed.
+
+    * R CMD INSTALL reports the compilers (and on macOS, the SDK) used,
+      and this is copied to the output of R CMD check.
+
+      Where a C++ standard is specified, it is reported.
+
+    * R CMD check's 'checking compilation flags in Makevars' has been
+      relaxed to accept the use of flags such as -std=f2008 in
+      PKG_FFLAGS.
+
+    * tools::buildVignettes() has a new argument skip, which is used by
+      R CMD check to skip (and note) vignettes with unavailable
+      \VignetteDepends (PR#18318).
+
+    * New generic .AtNames() added to enable class-specific completions
+      after @. The formerly internal function findMatches() is now
+      exported, mainly for use in methods for .DollarNames() and
+      .AtNames().
+
+  DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
+
+    * default.stringsAsFactors() is defunct.
+
+    * Calling as.data.frame.<class>() directly (for 12 atomic classes)
+      is going to be formally deprecated, currently activated by
+      setting the environment variable
+      _R_CHECK_AS_DATA_FRAME_EXPLICIT_METHOD_ to non-empty, which also
+      happens in R CMD check --as-cran.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * Hashed environments with sizes less than 5 can now grow.
+      (Reported to R-devel by Duncan Garmonsway.)
+
+    * as.character(<Rd>, deparse = TRUE) failed to re-escape curly
+      braces in LaTeX-like text.  (Reported by Hadley Wickham in
+      PR#18324.)
+
+    * library() now passes its lib.loc argument when requiring Depends
+      packages; reported (with fix) in PR#18331 by Mikael Jagan.
+
+    * R CMD Stangle: improved message about 'Output' files.
+
+    * head(x, n) and tail(x, n) now signal an error if n is not
+      numeric, instead of incidentally "working" sometimes returning
+      all of x.  Reported and discussed by Colin Fay, in PR#18357.
+
+    * The "lm" method for summary() now gives the correct F-statistic
+      when the model contains an offset.  Reported in PR#18008.
+
+    * C() and `contrasts<-`() now preserve factor level names when
+      given a function object (as opposed a function name which did
+      preserve names). Reported in PR#17616.
+
+    * c(a = 1, 2)[[]] no longer matches 2 but rather signals a
+      _classed_ error.  Reported and analysed by Davis Vaughan in
+      PR#18367, a duplicate of PR#18004, by Jan Meis et al.  For
+      consistency, NULL[[]] is also erroneous now.  x[[]] <- v gives an
+      error of the same class "MissingSubscriptError".
+
+    * The relist() function of utils now supports NULL elements in the
+      skeleton (PR#15854).
+
+    * ordered(levels = *) (missing x) now works analogously to factor(,
+      ordered=TRUE); reported (with fix) by Achim Zeileis in PR#18389.
+
+    * User-defined Rd macro definitions can now span multiple lines,
+      thanks to a patch from Duncan Murdoch. Previously, the Rd parser
+      silently ignored everything after the first line.
+
+    * Plain-text help (tools::Rd2txt()) now preserves an initial blank
+      line for text following description list items.
+
+    * tools::Rd2HTML() and tools::Rd2latex() no longer split \arguments
+      and \value lists at Rd comments.
+
+    * tools::Rd2latex() now correctly handles optional text outside
+      \items of argument lists as well as bracketed text at the
+      beginning of sections, e.g., \value{[NULL]}.
+
+    * as.character(<POSIXt>) now behaves more in line with the methods
+      for atomic vectors such as numbers, and is no longer influenced
+      by options().  Ditto for as.character(<Date>).  The
+      as.character() method gets arguments digits and OutDec with
+      defaults _not_ depending on options().  Use of as.character(*,
+      format = .) now warns.
+
+    * Similarly, the as.character.hexmode() and *.octmode() methods
+      also behave as good citizen methods and back compatibility option
+      keepStr = TRUE.
+
+    * The as.POSIXlt(<POSIXlt>) and as.POSIXct(<POSIXct>) default
+      methods now do obey their tz argument, also in this case.
+
+    * as.POSIXlt(<Date>) now does apply a tz (time zone) argument, as
+      does as.POSIXct(); partly suggested by Roland Fuss on the R-devel
+      mailing list.
+
+    * as.Date.POSIXlt(x) now also works when the list components are of
+      unequal length, aka "partially filled" or "ragged".
+
+    * expand.model.frame() looked up variables in the wrong environment
+      when applied to models fitted without data.  Reported in
+      PR#18414.
+
+    * time() now (also) uses the ts.eps = getOption("ts.eps") argument
+      and thus by default rounds values very close to the start (or
+      end) of a year.  Based on a proposal by Andre? V. Kostyrka on
+      R-help.
+
+    * Printing of a factanal() result with just one factor and sort =
+      TRUE now works regularly, fixing PR#17863 by Timothy Bates,
+      thanks to the 'R Contributors' working group.
+
+    * Printing 0-length objects of class "factor", "roman", "hexmode",
+      "octmode", "person", "bibentry", or "citation" now prints
+      something better, one of which fixes PR#18422, reported by
+      Benjamin Feakins.
+
+    * Sys.timezone() queries timedatectl only if systemd is loaded;
+      addressing a report by Jan Gorecki in PR#17421.
+
+    * The formula method of cor.test() had scoping problems when
+      environment(formula) was not the calling environment; reported
+      with a patch proposal by Mao Kobayashi in PR#18439.
+
+    * attach() of an environment with active bindings now preserves the
+      active bindings.  Reported by Kevin Ushey in PR#18425.
+
+    * BLAS detection now works also with system-provided libraries not
+      available as regular files.  This fixes detection of the
+      Accelerate framework on macOS since Big Sur.  Reported by David
+      Novgorodsky.
+
+    * download.file() gives a helpful error message in case of an
+      invalid download.file.method option, thanks to Colin Fay's report
+      in PR#18455.
+
+    * Sporadic crashes of Rterm when using completion have been fixed.
+
+    * Rprof() is now more reliable.  A livelock in thread
+      initialization with too short sampling interval has been fixed on
+      macOS.  A deadlock in using the C runtime has been fixed on
+      Windows.  A potential deadlock has been prevented on Unix.
+
+    * Cursor placement in Rgui now works even after a fixed-width font
+      is selected.
+
+    * Mandatory options (options()) are now set on startup so that
+      saving and restoring them always works (PR#18372).
+
+    * Package installation, R CMD INSTALL or install.packages(*), now
+      parses each of the <pkg>/R/*.R files individually instead of
+      first concatenating and then parse()ing the large resulting file.
+      This allows parser or syntax errors to be diagnosed with correct
+      file names and line numbers, thanks to Simon Dedman's report and
+      Bill Dunlap's patch in PR#17859.
+
+      This _does_ require syntactically self contained R source files
+      now, fixing another inadvertent bug.
+
+    * predict.lm(<model with offset>) now finds the offset in the
+      correct environment, thanks to Andr? Gillibert's report and patch
+      in PR#18456.
+
+    * getInitial(<formula>) now finds the selfStart model in the
+      correct environment.  (Reported by Ivan Krylov in PR#18368.)
+
+    * Fix for possible segfault when using recently-added graphics
+      features, such as gradients, clipping paths, masks, and groups
+      with pdf(file=NULL).
+
+    * class(m) <- class(m) no longer changes a matrix m by adding a
+      class _attribute_.
+
+    * packageDate(pkg) now only warns once if there is no pkg.
+
+    * When ts() creates a multivariate time series, "mts", it also
+      inherits from "array" now, and is.mts() is documented _and_
+      stricter.
+
+    * Rd2txt() now preserves line breaks of \verb Rd content and from
+      duplicated \cr.  The former also fixes the rendering of verbatim
+      output from Rd \Sexpr in plain-text help.
+
+    * uniroot(f, interval) should no longer wrongly converge _outside_
+      the interval in some cases where abs(f(x)) == Inf for an x at the
+      interval boundary, thanks to posts by Ben Bolker and Serguei
+      Sokol on R-devel.
+
+    * Vectorized alpha handling in palette functions such as in gray(),
+      rainbow(), or hcl.colors() works correctly now, thanks to Achim
+      Zeileis' report and patch in PR#18476.
+
+    * Formatting and print()ing of bibentry objects has dropped the
+      deprecated citation.bibtex.max argument, such that the bibtex
+      argument's default for print.bibentry() depends directly on the
+      citation.bibtex.max option, whereas in format.bibentry() the
+      option no longer applies.
+
+    * Attempting to use a character string naming a foreign function
+      entry point in a foreign function call in a package will now
+      signal an error if the packages has called R_forceSymbols to
+      specify that symbols must be used.
+
+    * An error in table() could permanently set options(warn=2)
+      promoting all subsequent warnings to errors.
+
+    * The sigma() function gave misleading results for binary GLMs.  A
+      new method for objects of class "glm" returns the square root of
+      the estimate of the dispersion parameter using the same
+      calculation as summary.glm().
+
+    * bs() and ns() in the (typical) case of automatic knot
+      construction, when some of the supposedly inner knots coincide
+      with boundary knots, now moves them inside (with a warning),
+      building on PR#18442 by Ben Bolker.
+
+    * R CMD on Windows now skips the site profile with --no-site-file
+      and --vanilla even when R_PROFILE is set (PR#18512, from Kevin
+      Ushey).
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.2.3:
+
+  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
+
+    * The definition of DL_FUNC in R_ext/Rdynload.h has been changed to
+      be fully C-compliant.  This means that functions loaded _via_ for
+      example R_GetCCallable need to be cast to an appropriate type if
+      they have any arguments.
+
+    * .Machine has a new element sizeof.time_t to identify old systems
+      with a 32-bit type and hence a limited range of date-times (and
+      limited support for dates millions of years from present).
+
+  PACKAGE INSTALLATION:
+
+    * (Windows) The default C++ standard had accidentally been left at
+      C++11 when it was changed to C++14 on Unix.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * As "POSIXlt" objects may be "partially filled" and their list
+      components meant to be recycled, length() now is the length of
+      the longest component.
+
+    * as.POSIXlt.Date() could underflow for dates in the far past (more
+      than half a million years BCE).
+
+    * as.Date.POSIXlt(x) would return "1970-01-01" instead of NA in R
+      4.2.2, e.g., for
+
+              x <- as.POSIXlt(c("2019-01-30","2001-1-1"))
+              x$mon <- c(0L, NA); as.Date(x)
+      
+    * R CMD check failed to apply enabled _R_CHECK_SUGGESTS_ONLY_ to
+      examples and vignettes (regression in R 4.2.0).
+
+    * R CMD check did not re-build vignettes in separate processes by
+      default (regression in R 4.2.0).
+
+    * Running examples from HTML documentation now restores previous
+      knitr settings and options (PR#18420).
+
+    * Quartz: fonts are now located using Core Graphics API instead of
+      deprecated ATS which is no longer supported in the macOS 13 SDK
+      (PR#18426).  This also addresses an issue where the currently
+      used font in the Quartz device context was not correctly
+      retained.
+
+    * (Windows) Math symbols in text drawing functions are again
+      rendered correctly (PR#18440).  This fixes a regression in R
+      4.2.1 caused by a fix in PR#18382 which uncovered an issue in
+      GraphApp due to which the symbol charset was not used with TT
+      Symbol font face.
+
+    * (Windows) Installing a package with a src/Makefile.{win,ucrt}
+      file includes ~/.R/Makevars.win64 in the search for user
+      makevars, as documented in "R Installation and Administration"
+      and done for packages with a src/Makevars.{win,ucrt} file.
+
+    * format(<POSIXlt_w/_unbalanced_sec>, "....%OS<n>") with n > 0 no
+      longer accidentally uses the unbalanced seconds, thanks to
+      Suharto Anggono's report (including patch) in PR#18448.
+
+    * solve.default(a, b) works around issues with some versions of
+      LAPACK when a contains NA or NaN values.
+
+    * When UseMethod() cannot dispatch, it no longer segfaults
+      producing the error message in case of a long class(), thanks to
+      Joris Vankerschaver's report (including patch) in PR#18447.
+
+    * When example(foo, ..) produces graphics on an interactive device
+      it needs to open itself, it now leaves devAskNewPage() unchanged
+      even when it was FALSE, thus fixing a 14 years old '<FIXME>'.
+
+    * packageDescription() again catches errors from encoding
+      conversions. This also fixes broken packageVersion() in C locale
+      on systems where iconv does not support transliteration.
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.2.2:
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * tools::Rdiff(useDiff = TRUE) checks for the presence of an
+      external diff command and switches to useDiff = FALSE if none is
+      found.  This allows R CMD Rdiff to always work.
+
+    * On Windows, environment variable R_LIBCURL_SSL_REVOKE_BEST_EFFORT
+      can be used to switch to only 'best-effort' SSL certificate
+      revocation checks with the default "libcurl" download method.
+      This reduces security, but may be needed for downloads to work
+      with MITM proxies (PR#18379).
+
+    * (macOS) The run-time check for libraries from XQuartz for X11 and
+      Tcl/Tk no longer uses otool from the Apple Developer Tools
+      (PR#18400).
+
+    * The LaTeX style for producing the PDF manuals, Rd.sty, now loads
+      the standard amsmath, amsfonts and amssymb packages for greater
+      coverage of math commands in the Rd \eqn and \deqn macros.  The
+      \mathscr LaTeX command is also provided (via the mathrsfs
+      package, if available, or the amsfonts bundle otherwise),
+      fulfilling the wish of PR#18398.
+
+    * (Windows) The default format of readClipboard() and
+      writeClipboard() has been changed to 13 (CF_UNICODETEXT).
+
+  INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:
+
+    * The PDF manuals (if built) can be compacted by the new target
+      make compact-pdf (at the top level or in directory doc/manual).
+
+    * There is now configure support for LLVM clang 15 on Linux, which
+      defaults to position-independent (PIE) executables whereas
+      gfortran does not.
+
+    * Many small changes to ease compilation (and suppress warnings)
+      with LLVM clang 15.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * Rscript -e would fail if stdin were closed (Reported by Henrik
+      Bengtsson.)
+
+    * qt(*, log.p=TRUE) in outer tails no longer produces NaN in its
+      final steps, thus fixing PR#18360.
+
+    * tools::Rd2latex() now escapes hashes and ampersands when writing
+      URLs, fixing LaTeX errors with such URLs in \tabular.
+
+    * When isGeneric(f, fdef=*) is used with mismatching names, the
+      warning is better understandable; reported (with fix) in PR#18370
+      by Gabe Becker.
+
+    * poly(x, n) now works again (and is now documented) when x is a
+      "Date" or "POSIXct" object, or of another class while fulfilling
+      mode(x) == "numeric".  This also enables poly(x, *, raw=TRUE) for
+      such variables.  Reported by Michael Chirico to R-devel.
+
+    * write.table(), write.csv() and write.csv2() restore their
+      numerical precision (internal equivalent of digits = 15) after an
+      interrupt (PR#18384).
+
+    * One can now read also byte FF from a clipboard connection
+      (PR#18385).
+
+    * source("") and source(character()) now give more helpful error
+      messages.
+
+    * R CMD check --as-cran set _R_CHECK_TIMINGS_ too late to have the
+      intended effect.
+
+    * as.POSIXlt(x) now also works with very large dates x, fixing
+      PR#18401 reported by Hannes M?hleisen.
+
+    * Files can now be extracted even from very large zip archives
+      (PR#18390, thanks to Martin Jakt).
+
+    * Non-finite objects of class "POSIXlt" are now correctly coerced
+      to classes "Date" and "POSIXct"; following up on the extension to
+      format() them correctly.
+
+    * Added methods for is.finite(), is.infinite() and is.nan() for
+      "POSIXlt" date-time objects.
+
+  BUG FIXES on Windows:
+
+    * Non-ASCII characters are now properly displayed on Windows in
+      windows created using GraphApp via e.g. winDialogString thanks to
+      a workaround for an at least surprising Windows behavior with
+      UTF-8 as the system encoding (PR#18382).
+
+    * Find and replace operations work again in the script editor in
+      Rgui on Windows.
+
+    * Computation of window size based on requested client size in
+      GraphApp when running in a multi-byte locale on Windows has been
+      fixed (regression in R 4.2.0 for users of systems where R 4.1
+      used a single-byte locale).  Rgui again respects the number of
+      console rows and columns given in Rconsole file.
+
+    * Rterm support for Alt+xxx sequences has been fixed to produce the
+      corresponding character (only) once. This fixes pasting text with
+      tilde on Italian keyboard (PR#18391).
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.2.1:
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * New function utils::findCRANmirror() to find out if a CRAN mirror
+      has been selected, otherwise fallback to the main site.  This
+      behaves in the same way as tools::CRAN_package_db() and is
+      intended for packages wishing to access CRAN for purposes other
+      than installing packages.
+
+      The need for this was shown by a day when the main CRAN website
+      was offline and a dozen or so packages which had its URL
+      hardcoded failed their checks.
+
+  INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:
+
+    * The libraries searched for by --with-blas (without a value) now
+      include BLIS (after OpenBLAS but before ATLAS).  And on macOS,
+      the Accelerate framework (after ATLAS).  (This is patterned after
+      the AX_BLAS macro from the Autoconf Archive.)
+
+    * The included LAPACK sources have been updated to 3.10.1.
+
+  UTILITIES:
+
+    * The (full path to) the command tidy to be used for HTML
+      validation can be set by environment variable R_TIDYCMD.
+
+    * Setting environment variable _R_CHECK_RD_VALIDATE_RD2HTML_ to a
+      false value will override R CMD check --as-cran and turn off HTML
+      validation.  This provides a way to circumvent a problematic
+      tidy.
+
+      The 2006 version that ships with macOS is always skipped.
+
+  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
+
+    * The undocumented legacy declarations of Sint, Sfloat, SINT_MAX
+      and SINT_MIN in header R.h are deprecated.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * fisher.test(d) no longer segfaults for "large" d; fixing PR#18336
+      by preventing/detecting an integer overflow reliably.
+
+    * tar(., files=*) now produces correctly the warning about invalid
+      uid or gid of files, fixing PR#18344, reported by Martin Morgan.
+
+    * tk_choose.files() with multi = FALSE misbehaved on paths
+      containing spaces (PR#18334) (regression introduced in R 4.0.0).
+
+    * sort(x, partial = ind, *) now works correctly notably for the
+      non-default na.last = FALSE or TRUE, fixing PR#18335 reported by
+      James Edwards.
+
+    * Environment variable _R_CHECK_XREFS_REPOSITORIES_ is only used
+      for checking .Rd cross-references in R CMD check (as documented)
+      and not for other uses looking for a CRAN mirror.
+
+    * The search for a CRAN mirror when checking packages now uses
+      getOption("repos") if that specifies a CRAN mirror, even when it
+      does not also specify all three Bioconductor repositories (as was
+      previously required).
+
+    * The HTML code generated by tools::Rd2HTML() has been improved to
+      pass tidy 5.8.0.
+
+  BUG FIXES on Windows:
+
+    * Writing to a clipboard connection works again, fixing a
+      regression in R 4.2.0 (PR#18332).  Re-using a closed clipboard
+      connection longer issues a spurious warning about an ignored
+      encoding argument.
+
+    * C function getlocale no longer attempts to query an unsupported
+      category from the OS, even when requested at R level, which may
+      cause crashes when R 4.2.0 (which uses UCRT) is embedded
+      (reported by Kevin Ushey).
+
+    * Accent keys now work in GraphApp Unicode windows, which are used
+      by Rgui whenever running in a multibyte locale (so also in UTF-8,
+      hence fixing a regression in R 4.2.0 for users of systems where R
+      4.1 used a single-byte locale).
+
+    * Completion in Rgui now works also with non-ASCII characters.
+
+    * Rgui no longer truncates usage information with --help.
+
+    * Text injection from external applications via SendInput now works
+      in GraphApp Unicode windows, fixing a regression in R 4.2.0 for
+      Rgui users of systems where R 4.1 used a single-byte locale but R
+      4.2.0 uses UTF-8.
+
+    * Performance of txtProgressBar() in Rgui when running in a
+      multi-byte locale has been improved (fixing a performance
+      regression in R 4.2.0 for users of systems where R 4.1 used a
+      single-byte locale).
+
+    * The script editor in Rgui now works also on systems using UTF-8
+      as the native encoding.  Users of the script editor have to
+      convert their scripts with non-ASCII characters to UTF-8 before
+      reading them in R 4.2.1 or newer (on recent Windows where UTF-8
+      is used).  This fixes a regression in R 4.2.0, which prevented
+      some operations with scripts when they contained non-ASCII
+      characters.
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.2.0:
+
+  SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:
+
+    * The formula method of aggregate() now matches the generic in
+      naming its first argument x (resolving PR#18299 by Thomas
+      Soeiro).
+
+      This means that calling aggregate() with a formula as a named
+      first argument requires name formula in earlier versions of R and
+      name x now, so portable code should not name the argument (code
+      in many packages did).
+
+    * Calling && or || with either argument of length greater than one
+      now gives a warning (which it is intended will become an error).
+
+    * Calling if() or while() with a condition of length greater than
+      one gives an error rather than a warning.  Consequently,
+      environment variable _R_CHECK_LENGTH_1_CONDITION_ no longer has
+      any effect.
+
+    * Windows users should consult the WINDOWS section below for some
+      profound changes including
+
+        * Support for 32-bit builds has been dropped.
+
+        * UTF-8 locales are used where available.
+
+        * The default locations for the R installation and personal
+          library folder have been changed.
+
+      Thanks to Tomas Kalibera for months of work on the Windows port
+      for this release.
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * matrix(x, n, m) now warns in more cases where length(x) differs
+      from n * m, as suggested by Abby Spurdle and Wolfgang Huber in
+      Feb 2021 on the R-devel mailing list.
+
+      This warning can be turned into an error by setting environment
+      variable _R_CHECK_MATRIX_DATA_ to TRUE: R CMD check --as-cran
+      does so unless it is already set.
+
+    * Function file_test() in package utils gains tests for symlinks,
+      readability and writability.
+
+    * capabilities("libxml") is now false.
+
+      The description of capabilities("http/ftp") now reflects that it
+      refers to the default method, no longer the internal one.
+
+    * simplify2array() gains an except argument for controlling the
+      exceptions used by sapply().
+
+    * Environment variables R_LIBS_USER and R_LIBS_SITE are both now
+      set to the R system default if unset or empty, and can be set to
+      NULL to indicate an empty list of user or site library
+      directories.
+
+    * The warning for axis()(-like) calls in cases of relatively small
+      ranges (typically in log-scale situations) is slightly improved
+      _and_ suppressed from explicit calls to .axisPars() as has always
+      been the intention.
+
+    * The contrasts setter function `contrasts<-` gains an explicit
+      default how.many = NULL rather than just using missing(how.many).
+
+    * grid.pretty() gains a new optional argument n = 5.
+
+    * There is a new function .pretty() with option bounds as a
+      technical-utility version of pretty().  It and pretty() gain a
+      new argument f.min with a better than back-compatible default.
+
+    * Function grDevices::axisTicks() and related functions such as
+      graphics::axis() work better, notably for the log scale; partly
+      because of the pretty() improvements, but also because care is
+      taken e.g., when ylim is finite but diff(ylim) is infinite.
+
+    * nclass.FD() gains a digits option.
+
+    * The R Mathlib internal C function bd0() (called indirectly from a
+      dozen probability density and distribution functions such as
+      dpois(), dbinom(), dgamma(), pgamma() _etc_) has been
+      complemented by a more sophisticated and (mostly) more accurate C
+      function ebd0(), currently called only by internal dpois_raw()
+      improving accuracy for R level dpois() and potentially others
+      calling it such as dnbinom(), dgamma() or pgamma().  (Thanks to
+      Morten Welinder's PR#15628.)
+
+    * write.ftable() gains sep = " " argument as suggested by Thomas
+      Soeiro.
+
+    * The names of the locale categories supported by R's
+      Sys.getlocale() and Sys.setlocale() are now provided by variable
+      .LC.categories in the base namespace.
+
+    * The Date and POSIXt methods for hist() and the histogram method
+      for plot() now also use the new default col = "lightgray" in
+      consistency with the corresponding change to hist()'s default for
+      R 4.0.0.
+
+    * hist.default() gains new fuzz argument, and the histogram plot
+      method no longer uses fractional axis ticks when displaying
+      counts ("Frequency").
+
+    * mapply() and hence Map() now also obey the "max-or-0-if-any"
+      recycling rule, such that, e.g., Map(`+`, 1:3, 1[0]) is valid
+      now.
+
+    * as.character(<obj>) for "hexmode" or "octmode" objects now
+      fulfils the important basic rule as.character(x)[j] ===
+      as.character(x[j]).
+
+    * The set utility functions, notably intersect() have been tweaked
+      to be more consistent and symmetric in their two set arguments,
+      also preserving a common mode.
+
+    * substr(ch, start,end) <- new now e.g., preserves names(ch); ditto
+      for substring(), thanks to a patch from Brodie Gaslam.
+
+    * plot(<lm>) gains a extend.ylim.f argument, in partial response to
+      PR#15285; further PR#17784 is fixed thanks to several
+      contributors and a patch by Elin Waring.  The Cook's dist
+      contours get customizable via cook.col and cook.lty with a
+      different default color and their legend is nicer by default and
+      customizable via cook.legendChanges.
+
+    * Attempting to subset an object that is not subsettable now
+      signals an error of class notSubsettableError. The
+      non-subsettable object is contained in the object field of the
+      error condition.
+
+    * Subscript-out-of-bounds errors are now signaled as errors of
+      class subscriptOutOfBoundsError.
+
+    * Stack-overflow errors are now signaled as errors inheriting from
+      class stackOverflowError. See ?stackOverflowError for more
+      details.
+
+    * New partly experimental Sys.setLanguage() utility, solving the
+      main problem of PR#18055.
+
+    * gettext() and gettextf() get a new option trim = TRUE which when
+      set to false allows translations for strings such as "Execution
+      halted\n" typical for C code.
+
+    * An experimental implementation of hash tables is now available.
+      See ?hashtab for more details.
+
+    * identical() gains a extptr.as.ref argument for requesting that
+      external pointer objects be compared as reference objects.
+
+    * reorder() gets an argument decreasing which it passes to sort()
+      for level creation; based on the wish and patch by Thomas Soeiro
+      in PR#18243.
+
+    * as.vector() gains a data.frame method which returns a simple
+      named list, also clearing a long standing 'FIXME' to enable
+      as.vector(<data.frame>, mode="list").  This breaks code relying
+      on as.vector(<data.frame>) to return the unchanged data frame.
+
+    * legend() is now vectorized for arguments cex, x.intersp, and
+      text.width.  The latter can now also be specified as a vector
+      (one element for each column of the legend) or as NA for
+      computing a proper column wise maximum value of strwidth(legend).
+      The argument y.intersp can be specified as a vector with one
+      entry for each row of the legend.
+
+      legend() also gains new arguments title.cex and title.font.
+      Thanks to Swetlana Herbrandt.
+
+    * Deparsing no longer remaps attribute names dim, dimnames, levels,
+      names and tsp to historical S-compatible names (which structure()
+      maps back).
+
+    * sample() and sample.int() have additional sanity checks on their
+      size and n arguments.
+
+      all.equal.numeric() gains a sanity check on its tolerance
+      argument - calling all.equal(a, b, c) for three numeric vectors
+      is a surprisingly common error.
+
+      mean(na.rm =), rank(na.last =), barplot(legend.text =),
+      boxplot(), contour(drawlabels =), polygon(border =) and
+      methods::is(class2 =) have more robust sanity checks on their
+      arguments.
+
+      R CMD Rd2pdf (used by R CMD check) has a more robust sanity check
+      on the format of \alias{} commands.
+
+    * psigamma(x, deriv) for negative x now also works for deriv = 4
+      and 5; their underlying C level dpsifn() is documented in
+      'Writing R Extensions'.
+
+    * The HTML help system now uses HTML5 (wish of PR#18149).
+
+    * ks.test() now provides exact p-values also with ties and MC
+      p-values in the two-sample (Smirnov) case.  By Torsten Hothorn.
+
+    * ks.test() gains a formula interface, with y ~ 1 for the
+      one-sample (Kolmogorov) test and y ~ group for the two-sample
+      (Smirnov) test.  Contributed by Torsten Hothorn.
+
+    * The return value from ks.test() now has class c("ks.test",
+      "htest") - packages using try() need to take care to use
+      inherits() and not == on the class.
+
+    * New functions psmirnov(), qsmirnov() and rsmirnov() in package
+      stats implementing the asymptotic and exact distributions of the
+      two-sample Smirnov statistic.
+
+    * iconv() now allows sub = "c99" to use C99-style escapes for UTF-8
+      inputs which cannot be converted to encoding to.
+
+    * In a forward pipe |> expression it is now possible to use a named
+      argument with the placeholder _ in the rhs call to specify where
+      the lhs is to be inserted.  The placeholder can only appear once
+      on the rhs.
+
+    * The included LAPACK sources have been updated to version 3.10.0,
+      except for the four Fortran 77 routines which 3.10.0 has
+      re-implemented in Fortran 90 (where the older versions have been
+      retained as the R build process does not support Fortran 90).
+
+    * path.expand() and most other uses of tilde expansion now warn if
+      a path would be too long if expanded.  (An exception is
+      file.exists(), which silently returns false.)
+
+    * trunc(<Date>, *) now supports units = "months" or "years" for
+      consistency with the POSIXt method, thanks to Dirk Eddelbuettel's
+      proposal in PR#18099.
+
+    * list2DF() now checks that its arguments are of the same length,
+      rather than use recycling.
+
+    * The HTML help system has several new features: LaTeX-like math
+      can be typeset using either KaTeX or MathJax, usage and example
+      code is highlighted using Prism, and for dynamic help the output
+      of examples and demos can be shown within the browser if the
+      knitr package is installed. These features can be disabled by
+      setting the environment variable _R_HELP_ENABLE_ENHANCED_HTML_ to
+      a false value.
+
+  GRAPHICS:
+
+    * The graphics engine version, R_GE_version, has been bumped to 15
+      and so packages that provide graphics devices should be
+      reinstalled.
+
+    * The grid package now allows the user to specify a "vector" of
+      pattern fills.  The fill argument to gpar() accepts a list of
+      gradients and/or patterns and the functions linearGradient(),
+      radialGradient(), and pattern() have a new group argument.
+
+      Points grobs (data symbols) can now also have a pattern fill.
+
+      The grobCoords() function now returns a more informative and
+      complex result.
+
+    * The grid package has new functions for drawing isolated groups:
+      grid.group(), grid.define(), and grid.use().  These functions add
+      compositing operators and affine transformations to R's graphics
+      capabilities.
+
+      The grid package also has new functions for stroking and filling
+      paths: grid.stroke(), grid.fill(), and grid.fillStroke().
+
+      A new function as.path() allows the user to specify the fill rule
+      for a path that is to be used for clipping, stroking, or filling;
+      available options are "winding" and "evenodd".  A new function
+      as.mask() allows the user to specify the type of a mask;
+      available options are "alpha" and "luminance".
+
+      These new features are only supported so far (at most) on the
+      Cairo-based graphics devices and on the pdf() device.
+
+    * dev.capabilities() reports on device support for the new
+      features.
+
+    * par() now warns about unnamed non-character arguments to prevent
+      misuse such as {usr <- par("usr"); par(usr)}.
+
+  WINDOWS:
+
+    * R uses UTF-8 as the native encoding on recent Windows systems (at
+      least Windows 10 version 1903, Windows Server 2022 or Windows
+      Server 1903).  As a part of this change, R uses UCRT as the C
+      runtime.  UCRT should be installed manually on systems older than
+      Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 before installing R.
+
+    * The default personal library on Windows, folder R\win-library\x.y
+      where x.y stands for R release x.y.z, is now a subdirectory of
+      Local Application Data directory (usually a hidden directory
+      C:\Users\username\AppData\Local).  Use shell.exec(.libPaths()[1])
+      from R to open the personal library in Explorer when it is first
+      in the list (PR#17842).
+
+    * R uses a new 64-bit Tcl/Tk bundle.  The previous 32-bit/64-bit
+      bundle had a different layout and can no longer be used.
+
+    * Make files and installer scripts for Windows have been tailored
+      to Rtools42, the newly recommended 64-bit gcc 10.3 MinGW-W64 UCRT
+      toolchain.
+
+    * Rtools42 by default uses the Windows security features ASLR and
+      DEP; hence CRAN builds of R and packages also do.
+
+    * R now supports files Makevars.ucrt, Makefile.ucrt, configure.ucrt
+      and cleanup.ucrt in packages, which are used in preference to the
+      .win variants.  This allows keeping the .win files around to
+      support older versions of R.  This feature will be removed in the
+      future once support for older versions of R would no longer be
+      needed.
+
+    * R.version gains a new field crt (only on Windows) to denote the C
+      runtime.  The value is "ucrt".
+
+    * On Windows, download.file(method = "auto") and url(method =
+      "default") now follow Unix in using "libcurl" for all except
+      file:// URIs.
+
+    * Rtools42 includes an unpatched Msys2 build of GNU tar.  Paths
+      including drive letters can be made to work by adding
+      --force-local to environment variable TAR_OPTIONS.  (Rtools40 and
+      earlier included a patched version which defaulted to this
+      option.)
+
+    * Installer builds of R automatically find the Rtools42 software
+      collection as well as the compiler toolchain.  No PATH setting is
+      required from the user.
+
+    * The default installation directory of R for a user-only
+      installation has been changed to the User Program Files directory
+      (usually a hidden directory
+      C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Programs) to follow Windows
+      conventions.  Use shell.exec(R.home()) from R to open the R
+      installation directory in Explorer (PR#17842).
+
+    * R now supports installation-time patching of packages.  Patches
+      may be installed from a supplied URL or a local directory or
+      disabled.  Patches are included into the installed packages for
+      reference.  This experimental feature may be removed in the
+      future.
+
+    * libcurl is now required for building from source.
+
+    * The clipboard connection now works also with text in other than
+      the current native encoding (PR#18267, with Hiroaki Yutani).
+      Text is always pasted to the clipboard in UTF16-LE and the
+      encoding argument is ignored.
+
+    * The internal case-changing functions are now used by default on
+      Windows - this circumvents problems (for example with E acute) of
+      the UCRT Windows' runtime.
+
+    * R on Windows now uses the system memory allocator.  Doug Lea's
+      allocator was used since R 1.2.0 to mitigate performance
+      limitations seen with system allocators on earlier versions of
+      Windows.
+
+    * memory.limit() and memory.size() are now stubs on Windows (as on
+      Unix-alikes).
+
+    * Applications embedding R on Windows can now use additional
+      callbacks, which have so far only been available only on Unix
+      (PR#18286).
+
+  INSTALLATION:
+
+    * Facilities for accessing ftp:// sites are no longer tested
+      (except _pro tem_ for curlGetHeaders()) as modern browsers have
+      removed support.
+
+    * R can now be built with DEFS = -DSTRICT_R_HEADERS .
+
+  PACKAGE INSTALLATION:
+
+    * R CMD INSTALL no longer tangles vignettes. This completes an R
+      CMD build change in R 3.0.0 and affects packages built before R
+      3.0.2. Such packages should be re-made with R CMD build to have
+      the tangled R code of vignettes shipped with the tarball.
+
+    * USE_FC_LEN_T will become the default: this uses the correct
+      prototypes for Fortran BLAS/LAPACK routines called from C/C++,
+      and requires adjustment of most such calls - see 'Writing R
+      Extensions' ?6.6.1.  (This has been supported since R 3.6.2.)
+
+    * Package installation speed for packages installed with
+      keep.source has been improved. This resolve the issue reported by
+      Ofek Shilon in PR#18236.
+
+  UTILITIES:
+
+    * R CMD check can optionally report files/directories left behind
+      in home, /tmp (even though TMPDIR is set) and other directories.
+      See the "R Internals" manual for details.
+
+    * R CMD check now reports byte-compilation errors during
+      installation.  These are not usually fatal but may result in
+      parts of the package not being byte-compiled.
+
+    * _R_CHECK_DEPENDS_ONLY_ can be applied selectively to examples,
+      tests and/or vignettes in R CMD check: see the "R Internals"
+      manual.
+
+    * _R_CHECK_SRC_MINUS_W_IMPLICIT_ now defaults to true: recent
+      versions of Apple clang on macOS have made implicit function
+      declarations in C into a compilation error.
+
+    * R CMD check --as-cran makes use of the environment variable
+      AUTORECONF.  See the "R Internals" manual ?8 for further details.
+
+    * R CMD check --use-valgrind also uses valgrind when re-building
+      vignettes as some non-Sweave vignettes unhelpfully comment out
+      all their code when R CMD check runs vignettes.
+
+    * Errors in re-building vignettes (unless there are LaTeX errors)
+      are reported by R CMD check as ERROR rather than WARNING when
+      running vignettes has been skipped (as it frequently is in CRAN
+      checks and by --as-cran).
+
+    * R CMD Rd2pdf gains a --quiet option that is used by R CMD build
+      when building the PDF package manual.
+
+    * R CMD Rd2pdf now always runs LaTeX in batch mode, consistent with
+      Texinfo >= 6.7. The --batch option is ignored.
+
+    * R CMD build and R CMD check now include the Rd file name and line
+      numbers in the error message of an \Sexpr evaluation failure.
+
+    * For packages using the \doi Rd macro (now an install-time \Sexpr)
+      but no other dynamic Rd content, R CMD build now produces a
+      smaller tarball and is considerably faster - skipping temporary
+      package installation.
+
+    * R CMD check can optionally (but included in --as-cran) validate
+      the HTML produced from the packages .Rd files.  See
+      <https://blog.r-project.org/2022/04/08/enhancements-to-html-documentation/>:
+      this needs a fairly recent version of HTML Tidy to be available.
+
+  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
+
+    * The non-API header R_ext/R-ftp-http.h is no longer provided, as
+      the entry points it covered are now all defunct.
+
+    * A number of non-API declarations and macro definitions have been
+      moved from the installed header Rinternals.h to the internal
+      header Defn.h. Packages that only use entry points and
+      definitions documented to be part of the API as specified in
+      'Writing R Extensions' ?6 should not be affected.
+
+    * The macro USE_RINTERNALS no longer has any effect when compiling
+      package code.  Packages which also use R_NO_REMAP will need to
+      ensure that the remapped names are used for calls to API
+      functions that were formerly also made available as macros.
+
+    * The deprecated legacy S-compatibility macros PROBLEM, MESSAGE,
+      ERROR, WARN, WARNING, RECOVER, ... are no longer defined in
+      R_exts/RS.h (included by R.h).  Replace these by calls to
+      Rf_error and Rf_warning (defined in header R_ext/Error.h included
+      by R.h).
+
+      Header R_ext/RS.h no longer includes R_ext/Error.h.
+
+    * Header R_ext/Constants.h (included by R.h) when included from C++
+      now includes the C++ header cfloat rather than the C header
+      float.h (now possible as C++11 is required).
+
+    * The legacy S-compatibility macros DOUBLE_* in R_ext/Constants.h
+      (included by R.h) are deprecated.
+
+    * The deprecated S-compatibility macros SINGLE_* in
+      R_ext/Constants.h (included by R.h) have been removed.
+
+    * R_Calloc, R_Free and R_Realloc are preferred to their unprefixed
+      forms and error messages now use the prefix. These forms were
+      introduced in R 3.4.0 and are available even when
+      STRICT_R_HEADERS is defined.
+
+    * rmultinom has been documented in 'Writing R Extensions' ?6 so is
+      now part of the R API.
+
+    * Similarly, Rtanpi, called from R level tanpi() is now part of the
+      R API.
+
+    * The long-deprecated, undocumented and non-API entry point call_R
+      is no longer declared in R_ext/RS.h (included by R.h).
+
+    * The header S.h which has been unsupported since Jan 2016 has been
+      removed.  Use R.h instead.
+
+  DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
+
+    * The (non-default and deprecated) method = "internal" for
+      download.file() and url() no longer supports http:// nor ftp://
+      URIs.  (It is used only for file:// URIs.)
+
+      On Windows, download.file(method = "wininet") no longer supports
+      ftp:// URIs.  (It is no longer the default method, which is
+      "libcurl" and does.)
+
+      On Windows, the deprecated method = "wininet" now gives a warning
+      for http:// and https:// URIs for both download.file() and url().
+      (It is no longer the default method.)
+
+    * On Windows, the command-line option --max-mem-size and
+      environment variable R_MAX_MEM_SIZE are defunct.  The memory
+      allocation limit was important for 32-bit builds, but these are
+      no longer supported.
+
+    * default.stringsAsFactors() is now formally deprecated, where that
+      was only mentioned on its regular help page, previously.  So it
+      now gives a warning if called.
+
+    * unix.time() is defunct now; it had been deprecated since R 3.4.0.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * Setting digits = 0 in format(), print.default() (and hence
+      typically print()) or options() is again invalid.  Its behaviour
+      was platform-dependent, and it is unclear what "zero significant
+      digits" should mean (PR#18098).
+
+    * Messages from C code in the cairo section of package grDevices
+      are now also offered for translation, thanks to Michael Chirico's
+      PR#18123.
+
+    * mean(x) with finite x now is finite also without "long.double"
+      capability.
+
+    * R CMD Rd2pdf no longer leaves an empty build directory behind
+      when it aborts due to an already existing output file.  (Thanks
+      to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18141.)
+
+    * density(x, weights = w, na.rm = TRUE) when anyNA(x) is true, now
+      removes weights "in parallel" to x, fixing PR#18151, reported by
+      Matthias Gondan.  Additionally, it gets a subdensity option.
+
+    * Conversion of \Sexpr[]{<expR>} to LaTeX or HTML no longer
+      produces long blocks of empty lines when <expR> itself contains
+      several lines all producing empty output.  Thanks to a report and
+      patch by Ivan Krylov posted to R-devel.
+
+    * R CMD build no longer fails if a package vignette uses child
+      documents and inst/doc exists.  (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's
+      PR#18156.)
+
+    * When an R documentation ('help' source) file man/foo.Rd in a
+      package has \donttest{..} examples with a syntax error, it is now
+      signalled as ERROR and with correct line numbers relating to the
+      *-Ex.R file, thanks to Duncan Murdoch and Sebastian Meyer's
+      reports and patch proposals in PR#17501.
+
+    * Improved determination of the correct translation domain in
+      non-base packages, addressing the combination of PR#18092 and
+      PR#17998 (#c6) with reports and _augmented_ patch #2904 by
+      Suharto Anggono.
+
+      Note that "R-base" is no longer the default domain e.g., for
+      top-level calls to gettext(); rather translation needs explicit
+      domain = * specification in such cases.
+
+    * identical(attrib.as.set=FALSE) now works correctly with data
+      frames with default row names (Thanks to Charlie Gao's PR#18179).
+
+    * txtProgressBar() now enforces a non-zero width for argument char,
+      without which no progress can be visible.
+
+    * dimnames(table(d)) is more consistent in the case where d is a
+      list with a single component, thanks to Thomas Soeiro's report to
+      R-devel.
+
+      Further, table(d1, d2) now gives an error when d1 and d2 are data
+      frames as suggested by Thomas in PR#18224.
+
+    * Fix for drawing semi-transparent lines and fills on the native
+      Windows graphics device (PR#18219 and PR#16694).  Thanks to Nick
+      Ray for helpful diagnosis on Bugzilla.
+
+    * The deparser now wraps sub-expressions such as if(A) ..  with
+      parentheses when needed; thanks to Duncan Murdoch's PR#18232 and
+      Lionel Henry's patches there.
+
+    * remove.packages() no longer tries to uninstall Priority: base
+      packages, thanks to a report and suggestions by Colin Fay in
+      PR#18227.
+
+    * win.metafile() now has xpinch and ypinch arguments so that the
+      user can override Windows' (potentially wrong) guess at device
+      dimensions.
+
+    * x[i] and x[[i]] for non-integer i should now behave in all cases
+      as always documented: the index used is equivalent to
+      as.integer(i) unless that would overflow where trunc(i) is used
+      instead; thanks to Suharto Anggono's report and patch proposals
+      in PR#17977.
+
+    * asOneSidedFormula() now associates the resulting formula with the
+      global environment rather than the evaluation environment created
+      for the call.
+
+    * <bibentry>$name now matches the field name case-insensitively,
+      consistent with bibentry() creation and the replacement method.
+
+    * cbind() failed to detect some length mismatches with a mixture of
+      time-series and non-time-series inputs.
+
+    * The default LaTeX style file Sweave.sty used by the RweaveLatex
+      driver no longer loads the obsolete ae package; thanks to a
+      report by Thomas Soeiro in PR#18271.  Furthermore, it now skips
+      \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} for engines other than pdfTeX (if
+      detected) or if the new [nofontenc] option is used.
+
+    * smooth.spline() now stores its logical cv argument more safely,
+      fixing a rare bug when printing, and also stores n.
+
+    * smooth.spline(x,y,*) now computes the cv.crit statistic
+      correctly, also when is.unsorted(x), fixing PR#18294.
+
+    * The data.frame method of rbind() now warns when binding
+      not-wholly-recycling vectors, by analogy to the default method
+      (for matrices).
+
+    * setAs() finds the correct class for name to when multiple
+      packages define a class with that name. Thanks to Gabor Csardi
+      for the report.
+
+    * Fix for detaching a package when two classes of the same name are
+      present in method signatures for the same generic. Thanks to
+      Gabor Csardi for the report.
+
+    * match.arg("", c("", "a", "B")) gives a better error message, in
+      part from PR#17959, thanks to Elin Waring.
+
+    * R CMD Sweave --clean no longer removes pre-existing files or
+      subdirectories (PR#18242).
+
+    * The quartz() device no longer splits polylines into subpaths.
+      That has caused narrowly-spaced lines with many points to always
+      look solid even when dashed line type was used due to dash phase
+      restarts.
+
+    * Deparsing constructs such as quote(1 + `!`(2) + 3) works again as
+      before R 3.5.0, thanks to the report and patch in PR#18284 by
+      Suharto Anggono.
+
+    * as.list(f) for a factor f now keeps names(f), fixing PR#18309.
+
+    * qbeta(.001, .9, .009) and analogous qf() calls now return a
+      correct value instead of NaN or wrongly 1, all with a warning;
+      thanks to the report by Ludger Goeminne in PR#18302.
+
+    * plot.lm() failed to produce the plot of residuals vs.  factor
+      levels (i.e., which=5 when leverages are constant) for models
+      with character predictors (PR#17840).
+
+    * interaction.plot(..., xtick = TRUE) misplaced the x-axis line
+      (PR#18305).
+
+    * Not strictly fixing a bug, format()ing and print()ing of
+      non-finite Date and POSIXt values NaN and +/-Inf no longer show
+      as NA but the respective string, e.g., Inf, for consistency with
+      numeric vector's behaviour, fulfilling the wish of PR#18308.
+
+    * R CMD check no longer runs test scripts generated from
+      corresponding .Rin files twice and now signals an ERROR if
+      processing an .Rin script fails.
+
+    * tools::Rd2txt() used for plain-text help pages now renders \hrefs
+      (if tools::Rd2txt_options(showURLs = TRUE)) and \urls with
+      percent-encoding and standards-compliant delimiting style (angle
+      brackets and no URL: prefix).  \email is now rendered with a
+      mailto: prefix.
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.1.3:
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * The default version of Bioconductor has been changed to 3.14.
+      (This is used by setRepositories and the menus in GUIs.)
+
+  UTILITIES:
+
+    * R CMD check --as-cran has a workaround for a bug in versions of
+      file up to at least 5.41 which mis-identify DBF files last
+      changed in 2022 as executables.
+
+  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
+
+    * The legacy S-compatibility macros SINGLE_* in R_ext/Constants.h
+      (included by R.h) are deprecated and will be removed in R 4.2.0.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * Initialization of self-starting nls() models with initialization
+      functions following the pre-R-4.1.0 API (without the ...
+      argument) works again for now, with a deprecation warning.
+
+    * Fixed quoting of ~autodetect~ in Java setting defaults to avoid
+      inadvertent user lookup due to leading ~, reported in PR#18231 by
+      Harold Gutch.
+
+    * substr(., start, stop) <- v now treats _negative_ stop values
+      correctly.  Reported with a patch in PR#18228 by Brodie Gaslam.
+
+    * Subscripting an array x without dimnames by a
+      length(dim(x))-column character matrix gave "random" non-sense,
+      now an error; reported in PR#18244 by Mikael Jagan.
+
+    * ...names() now matches names(list(...)) closely, fixing PR#18247.
+
+    * all.equal(*, scale = s) now works as intended when length(s) > 1,
+      partly thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18272.
+
+    * print(x) for long vectors x now also works for named atomic
+      vectors or lists and prints the correct number when reaching the
+      getOption("max.print") limit; partly thanks to a report and
+      proposal by Hugh Parsonage to the R-devel list.
+
+    * all.equal(<selfStart>, *) no longer signals a deprecation
+      warning.
+
+    * reformulate(*, response=r) gives a helpful error message now when
+      length(r) > 1, thanks to Bill Dunlap's PR#18281.
+
+    * Modifying globalCallingHandlers inside withCallingHandlers() now
+      works or fails correctly, thanks to Henrik Bengtsson's PR#18257.
+
+    * hist(<Date>, breaks = "days") and hist(<POSIXt>, breaks = "secs")
+      no longer fail for inputs of length 1.
+
+    * qbeta(.001, .9, .009) and similar cases now converge correctly
+      thanks to Ben Bolker's report in PR#17746.
+
+    * window(x, start, end) no longer wrongly signals "'start' cannot
+      be after 'end'", fixing PR#17527 and PR#18291.
+
+    * data() now checks that its (rarely used) list argument is a
+      character vector - a couple of packages passed other types and
+      gave incorrect results.
+
+    * which() now checks its arr.ind argument is TRUE rather coercing
+      to logical and taking the first element - which gave incorrect
+      results in package code.
+
+    * model.weights() and model.offset() more carefully extract their
+      model components, thanks to Ben Bolker and Tim Taylor's R-devel
+      post.
+
+    * list.files(recursive = TRUE) now shows all broken symlinks
+      (previously, some of them may have been omitted, PR#18296).
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.1.2:
+
+  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
+
+    * The workaround in headers R.h and Rmath.h (using namespace std;)
+      for the Oracle Developer Studio compiler is no longer needed now
+      C++11 is required so has been removed.  A couple more usages of
+      log() (which should have been std::log()) with an int argument
+      are reported on Solaris.
+
+    * The undocumented limit of 4095 bytes on messages from the
+      S-compatibility macros PROBLEM and MESSAGE is now documented and
+      longer messages will be silently truncated rather than
+      potentially causing segfaults.
+
+    * If the R_NO_SEGV_HANDLER environment variable is non-empty, the
+      signal handler for SEGV/ILL/BUS signals (which offers recovery
+      user interface) is not set. This allows more reliable debugging
+      of crashes that involve the console.
+
+  DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
+
+    * The legacy S-compatibility macros PROBLEM, MESSAGE, ERROR, WARN,
+      WARNING, RECOVER, ... are deprecated and will be hidden in R
+      4.2.0. R's native interface of Rf_error and Rf_warning has long
+      been preferred.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * .mapply(F, dots, .) no longer segfaults when dots is not a list
+      and uses match.fun(F) as always documented; reported by Andrew
+      Simmons in PR#18164.
+
+    * hist(<Date>, ...) and hist(<POSIXt>, ...)  no longer pass
+      arguments for rect() (such as col and density) to axis().
+      (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18171.)
+
+    * \Sexpr{ch} now preserves Encoding(ch). (Thanks to report and
+      patch by Jeroen Ooms in PR#18152.)
+
+    * Setting the RNG to "Marsaglia-Multicarry" e.g., by RNGkind(), now
+      warns in more places, thanks to Andr? Gillibert's report and
+      patch in PR#18168.
+
+    * gray(numeric(), alpha=1/2) no longer segfaults, fixing PR#18183,
+      reported by Till Krenz.
+
+    * Fixed dnbinom(x, size=<very_small>, .., log=TRUE) regression,
+      reported by Martin Morgan.
+
+    * as.Date.POSIXlt(x) now keeps names(x), thanks to Davis Vaughan's
+      report and patch in PR#18188.
+
+    * model.response() now strips an "AsIs" class typically, thanks to
+      Duncan Murdoch's report and other discussants in PR#18190.
+
+    * try() is considerably faster in case of an error and long call,
+      as e.g., from some do.call().  Thanks to Alexander Kaever's
+      suggestion posted to R-devel.
+
+    * qqline(y = <object>) such as y=I(.), now works, see also
+      PR#18190.
+
+    * Non-integer mgp par() settings are now handled correctly in
+      axis() and mtext(), thanks to Mikael Jagan and Duncan Murdoch's
+      report and suggestion in PR#18194.
+
+    * formatC(x) returns length zero character() now, rather than ""
+      when x is of length zero, as documented, thanks to Davis
+      Vaughan's post to R-devel.
+
+    * removeSource(fn) now retains (other) attributes(fn).
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.1.1:
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * require(pkg, quietly = TRUE) is quieter and in particular does
+      not warn if the package is not found.
+
+  DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
+
+    * 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.
+
+  INSTALLATION:
+
+    * make check now works also without a LaTeX installation.  (Thanks
+      to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18103.)
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * 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.)
+
+    * dnbinom(20, <large>, 1) now correctly gives 0, and similar cases
+      are more accurate with underflow precaution.  (Reported by
+      Francisco Vera Alcivar in PR#18072.)
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.1.0:
+
+  FUTURE DIRECTIONS:
+
+    * It is planned that the 4.1.x series will be the last to support
+      32-bit Windows, with production of binary packages for that
+      series continuing until early 2023.
+
+  SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:
+
+    * Data set esoph in package datasets now provides the correct
+      numbers of controls; previously it had the numbers of cases added
+      to these.  (Reported by Alexander Fowler in PR#17964.)
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * www.omegahat.net is no longer one of the repositories known by
+      default to setRepositories().  (Nowadays it only provides source
+      packages and is often unavailable.)
+
+    * Function package_dependencies() (in package tools) can now use
+      different dependency types for direct and recursive dependencies.
+
+    * The checking of the size of tarball in R CMD check --as-cran
+      <pkg> may be tweaked via the new environment variable
+      _R_CHECK_CRAN_INCOMING_TARBALL_THRESHOLD_, as suggested in
+      PR#17777 by Jan Gorecki.
+
+    * Using c() to combine a factor with other factors now gives a
+      factor, an ordered factor when combining ordered factors with
+      identical levels.
+
+    * apply() gains a simplify argument to allow disabling of
+      simplification of results.
+
+    * The format() method for class "ftable" gets a new option justify.
+      (Suggested by Thomas Soeiro.)
+
+    * New ...names() utility.  (Proposed by Neal Fultz in PR#17705.)
+
+    * type.convert() now warns when its as.is argument is not
+      specified, as the help file always said it _should_.  In that
+      case, the default is changed to TRUE in line with its change in
+      read.table() (related to stringsAsFactors) in R 4.0.0.
+
+    * When printing list arrays, classed objects are now shown _via_
+      their format() value if this is a short enough character string,
+      or by giving the first elements of their class vector and their
+      length.
+
+    * capabilities() gets new entry "Rprof" which is TRUE when R has
+      been configured with the equivalent of --enable-R-profiling (as
+      it is by default).  (Related to Michael Orlitzky's report
+      PR#17836.)
+
+    * str(xS4) now also shows extraneous attributes of an S4 object
+      xS4.
+
+    * Rudimentary support for vi-style tags in rtags() and R CMD rtags
+      has been added.  (Based on a patch from Neal Fultz in PR#17214.)
+
+    * checkRdContents() is now exported from tools; it and also
+      checkDocFiles() have a new option chkInternal allowing to check
+      Rd files marked with keyword "internal" as well.  The latter can
+      be activated for R CMD check via environment variable
+      _R_CHECK_RD_INTERNAL_TOO_.
+
+    * New functions numToBits() and numToInts() extend the raw
+      conversion utilities to (double precision) numeric.
+
+    * Functions URLencode() and URLdecode() in package utils now work
+      on vectors of URIs.  (Based on patch from Bob Rudis submitted
+      with PR#17873.)
+
+    * path.expand() can expand ~user on most Unix-alikes even when
+      readline is not in use.  It tries harder to expand ~, for example
+      should environment variable HOME be unset.
+
+    * For HTML help (both dynamic and static), Rd file links to help
+      pages in external packages are now treated as references to
+      topics rather than file names, and fall back to a file link only
+      if the topic is not found in the target package. The earlier rule
+      which prioritized file names over topics can be restored by
+      setting the environment variable _R_HELP_LINKS_TO_TOPICS_ to a
+      false value.
+
+    * c() now removes NULL arguments before dispatching to methods,
+      thus simplifying the implementation of c() methods, _but_ for
+      back compatibility keeps NULL when it is the first argument.
+      (From a report and patch proposal by Lionel Henry in PR#17900.)
+
+    * Vectorize()'s result function's environment no longer keeps
+      unneeded objects.
+
+    * Function ...elt() now propagates visibility consistently with
+      ..n.  (Thanks to Lionel Henry's PR#17905.)
+
+    * capture.output() no longer uses non-standard evaluation to
+      evaluate its arguments.  This makes evaluation of functions like
+      parent.frame() more consistent.  (Thanks to Lionel Henry's
+      PR#17907.)
+
+    * packBits(bits, type="double") now works as inverse of
+      numToBits().  (Thanks to Bill Dunlap's proposal in PR#17914.)
+
+    * curlGetHeaders() has two new arguments, timeout to specify the
+      timeout for that call (overriding getOption("timeout")) and TLS
+      to specify the minimum TLS protocol version to be used for
+      https:// URIs (_inter alia_ providing a means to check for sites
+      using deprecated TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1).
+
+    * For nls(), an optional constant scaleOffset may be added to the
+      denominator of the relative offset convergence test for cases
+      where the fit of a model is expected to be exact, thanks to a
+      proposal by John Nash.  nls(*, trace=TRUE) now also shows the
+      convergence criterion.
+
+    * Numeric differentiation _via_ numericDeriv() gets new optional
+      arguments eps and central, the latter for taking central divided
+      differences.  The latter can be activated for nls() via
+      nls.control(nDcentral = TRUE).
+
+    * nls() now passes the trace and control arguments to getInitial(),
+      notably for all self-starting models, so these can also be fit in
+      zero-noise situations via a scaleOffset.  For this reason, the
+      initial function of a selfStart model must now have ... in its
+      argument list.
+
+    * bquote(splice = TRUE) can now splice expression vectors with
+      attributes: this makes it possible to splice the result of
+      parse(keep.source = TRUE).  (Report and patch provided by Lionel
+      Henry in PR#17869.)
+
+    * textConnection() gets an optional name argument.
+
+    * get(), exists(), and get0() now signal an error if the first
+      argument has length greater than 1.  Previously additional
+      elements were silently ignored.  (Suggested by Antoine Fabri on
+      R-devel.)
+
+    * R now provides a shorthand notation for creating functions, e.g.
+      \(x) x + 1 is parsed as function(x) x + 1.
+
+    * R now provides a simple native forward pipe syntax |>.  The
+      simple form of the forward pipe inserts the left-hand side as the
+      first argument in the right-hand side call.  The pipe
+      implementation as a syntax transformation was motivated by
+      suggestions from Jim Hester and Lionel Henry.
+
+    * all.equal(f, g) for functions now by default also compares their
+      environment(.)s, notably via new all.equal method for class
+      function.  Comparison of nls() fits, e.g., may now need
+      all.equal(m1, m2, check.environment = FALSE).
+
+    * .libPaths() gets a new option include.site, allowing to _not_
+      include the site library.  (Thanks to Dario Strbenac's suggestion
+      and Gabe Becker's PR#18016.)
+
+    * Lithuanian translations are now available.  (Thanks to Rimantas
+      ?akauskas.)
+
+    * names() now works for DOTSXP objects.  On the other hand, in
+      R-lang, the R language manual, we now warn against relying on the
+      structure or even existence of such dot-dot-dot objects.
+
+    * all.equal() no longer gives an error on DOTSXP objects.
+
+    * capabilities("cairo") now applies only to the file-based devices
+      as it is now possible (if very unusual) to build R with Cairo
+      support for those but not for X11().
+
+    * There is optional support for tracing the progress of
+      loadNamespace() - see its help.
+
+    * (Not Windows.)  l10n_info() reports an additional element, the
+      name of the encoding as reported by the OS (which may differ from
+      the encoding part (if any) of the result from
+      Sys.getlocale("LC_CTYPE")).
+
+    * New function gregexec() which generalizes regexec() to find _all_
+      disjoint matches and all substrings corresponding to
+      parenthesized subexpressions of the given regular expression.
+      (Contributed by Brodie Gaslam.)
+
+    * New function charClass() in package utils to query the
+      wide-character classification functions in use (such as
+      iswprint).
+
+    * The names of quantile()'s result no longer depend on the global
+      getOption("digits"), but quantile() gets a new optional argument
+      digits = 7 instead.
+
+    * grep(), sub(), regexp and variants work considerably faster for
+      long factors with few levels.  (Thanks to Michael Chirico's
+      PR#18063.)
+
+    * Provide grouping of x11() graphics windows within a window
+      manager such as Gnome or Unity; thanks to a patch by Ivan Krylov
+      posted to R-devel.
+
+    * The split() method for class data.frame now allows the f argument
+      to be specified as a formula.
+
+    * sprintf now warns on arguments unused by the format string.
+
+    * New palettes "Rocket" and "Mako" for hcl.colors() (approximating
+      palettes of the same name from the viridisLite package).
+
+      Contributed by Achim Zeileis.
+
+    * The base environment and its namespace are now locked (so one can
+      no longer add bindings to these or remove from these).
+
+    * Rterm handling of multi-byte characters has been improved,
+      allowing use of such characters when supported by the current
+      locale.
+
+    * Rterm now accepts ALT+ +xxxxxxxx sequences to enter Unicode
+      characters as hex digits.
+
+    * Environment variable LC_ALL on Windows now takes precedence over
+      LC_CTYPE and variables for other supported categories, matching
+      the POSIX behaviour.
+
+    * duplicated() and anyDuplicated() are now optimized for integer
+      and real vectors that are known to be sorted via the ALTREP
+      framework. Contributed by Gabriel Becker via PR#17993.
+
+  GRAPHICS:
+
+    * The graphics engine version, R_GE_version, has been bumped to 14
+      and so packages that provide graphics devices should be
+      reinstalled.
+
+    * Graphics devices should now specify deviceVersion to indicate
+      what version of the graphics engine they support.
+
+    * Graphics devices can now specify deviceClip.  If TRUE, the
+      graphics engine will never perform any clipping of output itself.
+
+      The clipping that the graphics engine does perform (for both
+      canClip = TRUE and canClip = FALSE) has been improved to avoid
+      producing unnecessary artifacts in clipped output.
+
+    * The grid package now allows gpar(fill) to be a linearGradient(),
+      a radialGradient(), or a pattern().  The viewport(clip) can now
+      also be a grob, which defines a clipping path, and there is a new
+      viewport(mask) that can also be a grob, which defines a mask.
+
+      These new features are only supported so far on the Cairo-based
+      graphics devices and on the pdf() device.
+
+    * (Not Windows.)  A warning is given when a Cairo-based type is
+      specified for a png(), jpeg(), tiff() or bmp() device but Cairo
+      is unsupported (so type = "Xlib" is tried instead).
+
+    * grSoftVersion() now reports the versions of FreeType and
+      FontConfig if they are used directly (not _via_ Pango), as is
+      most commonly done on macOS.
+
+  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
+
+    * The _standalone_ libRmath math library and R's C API now provide
+      log1pexp() again as documented, and gain log1mexp().
+
+  INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:
+
+    * configure checks for a program pkgconf if program pkg-config is
+      not found.  These are now only looked for on the path (like
+      almost all other programs) so if needed specify a full path to
+      the command in PKG_CONFIG, for example in file config.site.
+
+    * C99 function iswblank is required - it was last seen missing ca
+      2003 so the workaround has been removed.
+
+    * There are new configure options --with-internal-iswxxxxx,
+      --with-internal-towlower and --with-internal-wcwidth which allows
+      the system functions for wide-character classification,
+      case-switching and width (wcwidth and wcswidth) to be replaced by
+      internal ones.  The first has long been used on macOS, AIX (and
+      Windows) but this enables it to be unselected there and selected
+      for other platforms (it is the new default on Solaris).  The
+      second is new in this version of R and is selected by default on
+      macOS and Solaris.  The third has long been the default and
+      remains so as it contains customizations for East Asian
+      languages.
+
+      System versions of these functions are often minimally
+      implemented (sometimes only for ASCII characters) and may not
+      cover the full range of Unicode points: for example Solaris (and
+      Windows) only cover the Basic Multilingual Plane.
+
+    * Cairo installations without X11 are more likely to be detected by
+      configure, when the file-based Cairo graphics devices will be
+      available but not X11(type = "cairo").
+
+    * There is a new configure option --with-static-cairo which is the
+      default on macOS.  This should be used when only static cairo
+      (and where relevant, Pango) libraries are available.
+
+    * Cairo-based graphics devices on platforms without Pango but with
+      FreeType/FontConfig will make use of the latter for font
+      selection.
+
+  LINK-TIME OPTIMIZATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:
+
+    * Configuring with flag --enable-lto=R now also uses LTO when
+      installing the recommended packages.
+
+    * R CMD INSTALL and R CMD SHLIB have a new flag --use-LTO to use
+      LTO when compiling code, for use with R configured with
+      --enable-lto=R.  For R configured with --enable-lto, they have
+      the new flag --no-use-LTO.
+
+      Packages can opt in or out of LTO compilation _via_ a UseLTO
+      field in the DESCRIPTION file.  (As usual this can be overridden
+      by the command-line flags.)
+
+  BUILDING R on Windows:
+
+    * for GCC >= 8, FC_LEN_T is defined in config.h and hence character
+      lengths are passed from C to Fortran in _inter alia_ BLAS and
+      LAPACK calls.
+
+    * There is a new text file src/gnuwin32/README.compilation, which
+      outlines how C/Fortran code compilation is organized and
+      documents new features:
+
+        * R can be built with Link-Time Optimization with a suitable
+          compiler - doing so with GCC 9.2 showed several
+          inconsistencies which have been corrected.
+
+        * There is support for cross-compiling the C and Fortran code
+          in R and standard packages on suitable (Linux) platforms.
+          This is mainly intended to allow developers to test later
+          versions of compilers - for example using GCC 9.2 or 10.x has
+          detected issues that GCC 8.3 in Rtools40 does not.
+
+        * There is experimental support for cross-building R packages
+          with C, C++ and/or Fortran code.
+
+    * The R installer can now be optionally built to support a single
+      architecture (only 64-bit or only 32-bit).
+
+  PACKAGE INSTALLATION:
+
+    * The default C++ standard has been changed to C++14 where
+      available (which it is on all currently checked platforms): if
+      not (as before) C++11 is used if available otherwise C++ is not
+      supported.
+
+      Packages which specify C++11 will still be installed using C++11.
+
+      C++14 compilers may give deprecation warnings, most often for
+      std::random_shuffle (deprecated in C++14 and removed in C++17).
+      Either specify C++11 (see 'Writing R Extensions') or modernize
+      the code and if needed specify C++14.  The latter has been
+      supported since R 3.4.0 so the package's DESCRIPTION would need
+      to include something like
+
+           Depends: R (>= 3.4)
+      
+  PACKAGE INSTALLATION on Windows:
+
+    * R CMD INSTALL and R CMD SHLIB make use of their flag --use-LTO
+      when the LTO_OPT make macro is set in file etc/${R_ARCH}/Makeconf
+      or in a personal/site Makevars file.  (For details see 'Writing R
+      Extensions' ?4.5.)
+
+      This provides a valuable check on code consistency.  It does work
+      with GCC 8.3 as in Rtools40, but that does not detect everything
+      the CRAN checks with current GCC do.
+
+  PACKAGE INSTALLATION on macOS:
+
+    * The default personal library directory on builds with
+      --enable-aqua (including CRAN builds) now differs by CPU type,
+      one of
+
+            ~/Library/R/x86_64/x.y/library
+            ~/Library/R/arm64/x.y/library
+      
+      This uses the CPU type R (and hence the packages) were built for,
+      so when a x86_64 build of R is run under Rosetta emulation on an
+      arm64 Mac, the first is used.
+
+  UTILITIES:
+
+    * R CMD check can now scan package functions for bogus return
+      statements, which were possibly intended as return() calls (wish
+      of PR#17180, patch by Sebastian Meyer). This check can be
+      activated via the new environment variable
+      _R_CHECK_BOGUS_RETURN_, true for --as-cran.
+
+    * R CMD build omits tarballs and binaries of previous builds from
+      the top-level package directory.  (PR#17828, patch by Sebastian
+      Meyer.)
+
+    * R CMD check now runs sanity checks on the use of LazyData, for
+      example that a data directory is present and that
+      LazyDataCompression is not specified without LazyData and has a
+      documented value.  For packages with large LazyData databases
+      without specifying LazyDataCompression, there is a reference to
+      the code given in 'Writing R Extensions' ?1.1.6 to test the
+      choice of compression (as in all the CRAN packages tested a
+      non-default method was preferred).
+
+    * R CMD build removes LazyData and LazyDataCompression fields from
+      the DESCRIPTION file of packages without a data directory.
+
+  ENCODING-RELATED CHANGES:
+
+    * The parser now treats \Unnnnnnnn escapes larger than the upper
+      limit for Unicode points (\U10FFFF) as an error as they cannot be
+      represented by valid UTF-8.
+
+      Where such escapes are used for outputting non-printable
+      (including unassigned) characters, 6 hex digits are used (rather
+      than 8 with leading zeros).  For clarity, braces are used, for
+      example \U{0effff}.
+
+    * The parser now looks for non-ASCII spaces on Solaris (as
+      previously on most other OSes).
+
+    * There are warnings (including from the parser) on the use of
+      unpaired surrogate Unicode points such as \uD834.  (These cannot
+      be converted to valid UTF-8.)
+
+    * Functions nchar(), tolower(), toupper() and chartr() and those
+      using regular expressions have more support for inputs with a
+      marked Latin-1 encoding.
+
+    * The character-classification functions used (by default) to
+      replace the system iswxxxxx functions on Windows, macOS and AIX
+      have been updated to Unicode 13.0.0.
+
+      The character-width tables have been updated to include new
+      assignments in Unicode 13.0.0.  This included treating all
+      control characters as having zero width.
+
+    * The code for evaluating default (extended) regular expressions
+      now uses the same character-classification functions as the rest
+      of R (previously they differed on Windows, macOS and AIX).
+
+    * There is a build-time option to replace the system's
+      wide-character wctrans C function by tables shipped with R: use
+      configure option --with-internal-towlower or (on Windows)
+      -DUSE_RI18N_CASE in CFLAGS when building R.  This may be needed
+      to allow tolower() and toupper() to work with Unicode characters
+      beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane where not supported by system
+      functions (e.g. on Solaris where it is the new default).
+
+    * R is more careful when truncating UTF-8 and other multi-byte
+      strings that are too long to be printed, passed to the system or
+      libraries or placed into an internal buffer.  Truncation will no
+      longer produce incomplete multibyte characters.
+
+  DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
+
+    * Function plclust() from the package stats and
+      package.dependencies(), pkgDepends(), getDepList(),
+      installFoundDepends(), and vignetteDepends() from package tools
+      are defunct.
+
+    * Defunct functions checkNEWS() and readNEWS() from package tools
+      and CRAN.packages() from utils have been removed.
+
+    * R CMD config CXXCPP is defunct (it was deprecated in R 3.6.2).
+
+    * parallel::detectCores() drops support for Irix (retired in 2013).
+
+    * The LINPACK argument to chol.default(), chol2inv(),
+      solve.default() and svd() has been defunct since R 3.1.0.  It was
+      silently ignored up to R 4.0.3 but now gives an error.
+
+    * Subsetting/indexing, such as ddd[*] or ddd$x on a DOTSXP
+      (dot-dot-dot) object ddd has been disabled; it worked by accident
+      only and was undocumented.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * Many more C-level allocations (mainly by malloc and strdup) are
+      checked for success with suitable alternative actions.
+
+    * Bug fix for replayPlot(); this was turning off graphics engine
+      display list recording if a recorded plot was replayed in the
+      same session.  The impact of the bug became visible if resize the
+      device after replay OR if attempted another savePlot() after
+      replay (empty display list means empty screen on resize or empty
+      saved plot).
+
+    * R CMD check etc now warn when a package exports non-existing S4
+      classes or methods, also in case of no "methods" presence.
+      (Reported by Alex Bertram; reproducible example and patch by
+      Sebastian Meyer in PR#16662.)
+
+    * boxplot() now also accepts calls for labels such as ylab, the
+      same as plot().  (Reported by Marius Hofert.)
+
+    * The help page for xtabs() now correctly states that addNA is
+      setting na.action = na.pass among others.  (Reported as PR#17770
+      by Thomas Soeiro.)
+
+    * The R CMD check <pkg> gives a longer and more comprehensible
+      message when DESCRIPTION misses dependencies, e.g., in Imports:.
+      (Thanks to the contributors of PR#17179.)
+
+    * update.default() now calls the generic update() on the formula to
+      work correctly for models with extended formulas.  (As reported
+      and suggested by Neal Fultz in PR#17865.)
+
+    * The horizontal position of leaves in a dendrogram is now correct
+      also with center = FALSE.  (PR#14938, patch from Sebastian
+      Meyer.)
+
+    * all.equal.POSIXt() no longer warns about and subsequently ignores
+      inconsistent "tzone" attributes, but describes the difference in
+      its return value (PR#17277).  This check can be disabled _via_
+      the new argument check.tzone = FALSE as suggested by Sebastian
+      Meyer.
+
+    * as.POSIXct() now populates the "tzone" attribute from its tz
+      argument when x is a logical vector consisting entirely of NA
+      values.
+
+    * x[[2^31]] <- v now works.  (Thanks to the report and patch by
+      Suharto Anggono in PR#17330.)
+
+    * In log-scale graphics, axis() ticks and label positions are now
+      computed more carefully and symmetrically in their range,
+      typically providing _more_ ticks, fulfilling wishes in PR#17936.
+      The change really corresponds to an improved axisTicks() (package
+      grDevices), potentially influencing grid and lattice, for
+      example.
+
+    * qnorm(<very large negative>, log.p=TRUE) is now correct to at
+      least five digits where it was catastrophically wrong,
+      previously.
+
+    * sum(df) and similar "Summary"- and "Math"-group member functions
+      now work for data frames df with logical columns, notably also of
+      zero rows.  (Reported to R-devel by Martin "b706".)
+
+    * unsplit() had trouble with tibbles due to unsound use of rep(NA,
+      len)-indexing, which should use NA_integer_ (Reported to R-devel
+      by Mario Annau.)
+
+    * pnorm(x, log.p = TRUE) underflows to -Inf slightly later.
+
+    * show(<hidden S4 generic>) prints better and without quotes for
+      non-hidden S4 generics.
+
+    * read.table() and relatives treated an "NA" column name as missing
+      when check.names = FALSE PR#18007.
+
+    * Parsing strings containing UTF-16 surrogate pairs such as
+      "\uD834\uDD1E" works better on some (uncommon) platforms.
+      sprintf("%X", utf8ToInt("\uD834\uDD1E")) should now give "1D11E"
+      on all platforms.
+
+    * identical(x,y) is no longer true for differing DOTSXP objects,
+      fixing PR#18032.
+
+    * str() now works correctly for DOTSXP and related exotics, even
+      when these are doomed.
+
+      Additionally, it no longer fails for lists with a class and
+      "irregular" method definitions such that e.g. lapply(*) will
+      necessarily fail, as currently for different igraph objects.
+
+    * Message translation domains, e.g., for errors and warnings, are
+      now correctly determined also when e.g., a base function is
+      called from "top-level" function (i.e., defined in globalenv()),
+      thanks to a patch from Joris Goosen fixing PR#17998.
+
+    * Too long lines in environment files (e.g., Renviron) no longer
+      crash R. This limit has been increased to 100,000 bytes.
+      (PR#18001.)
+
+    * There is a further workaround for FreeType giving incorrect
+      italic font faces with cairo-based graphics devices on macOS.
+
+    * add_datalist(*, force = TRUE) (from package tools) now actually
+      updates an existing data/datalist file for new content.  (Thanks
+      to a report and patch by Sebastian Meyer in PR#18048.)
+
+    * cut.Date() and cut.POSIXt() could produce an empty last interval
+      for breaks = "months" or breaks = "years".  (Reported as PR#18053
+      by Christopher Carbone.)
+
+    * Detection of the encoding of 'regular' macOS locales such as
+      en_US (which is UTF-8) had been broken by a macOS change:
+      fortunately these are now rarely used with en_US.UTF-8 being
+      preferred.
+
+    * sub() and gsub(pattern, repl, x, *) now keep attributes of x such
+      as names() also when pattern is NA (PR#18079).
+
+    * Time differences ("difftime" objects) get a replacement and a
+      rep() method to keep "units" consistent.  (Thanks to a report and
+      patch by Nicolas Bennett in PR#18066.)
+
+    * The \RdOpts macro, setting defaults for \Sexpr options in an Rd
+      file, had been ineffective since R 2.12.0: it now works again.
+      (Thanks to a report and patch by Sebastian Meyer in PR#18073.)
+
+    * mclapply and pvec no longer accidentally terminate parallel
+      processes started before by mcparallel or related calls in
+      package parallel (PR#18078).
+
+    * grep and other functions for evaluating (extended) regular
+      expressions handle in Unicode also strings not explicitly flagged
+      UTF-8, but flagged native when running in UTF-8 locale.
+
+    * Fixed a crash in fifo implementation on Windows (PR#18031).
+
+    * Binary mode in fifo on Windows is now properly detected from
+      argument open (PR#15600, PR#18031).
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.0.5:
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * The change to the internal table in R 4.0.4 for iswprint has been
+      reverted: it contained some errors in printability of 'East
+      Asian' characters.
+
+    * For packages using LazyData, R CMD build ignored the
+      --resave-data option and the BuildResaveData field of the
+      DESCRIPTION file (in R versions 4.0.0 to 4.0.4).
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.0.4:
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * File share/texmf/tex/latex/jss.cls has been updated to work with
+      LaTeX versions since Oct 2020.
+
+    * Unicode character width tables (as used by nchar(, type = "w"))
+      have been updated to Unicode 12.1 by Brodie Gaslam (PR#17781),
+      including many emoji.
+
+    * The internal table for iswprint (used on Windows, macOS and AIX)
+      has been updated to include many recent Unicode characters.
+
+  INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:
+
+    * If an external BLAS is specified by --with-blas=foo or _via_
+      environment variable BLAS_LIBS is not found, this is now a
+      configuration error.  The previous behaviour was not clear from
+      the documentation: it was to continue the search as if
+      --with-blas=yes was specified.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * all.equal(x,y) now "sees" the two different NAs in factors,
+      thanks to Bill Dunlap and others in PR#17897.
+
+    * (~ NULL)[1] and similar formula subsetting now works, thanks to a
+      report and patch by Henrik Bengtsson in PR#17935.  Additionally,
+      subsetting leaving an empty formula now works too, thanks to
+      suggestions by Suharto Anggono.
+
+    * .traceback(n) keeps source references again, as before R 4.0.0,
+      fixing a regression; introduced by the PR#17580, reported
+      including two patch proposals by Brodie Gaslam.
+
+    * unlist(plst, recursive=FALSE) no longer drops content for
+      pairlists with list components, thanks to the report and patch by
+      Suharto Anggono in PR#17950.
+
+    * iconvlist() now also works on MUSL based (Linux) systems, from a
+      report and patch suggestion by Wesley Chan in PR#17970.
+
+    * round() and signif() no longer tolerate wrong argument names,
+      notably in 1-argument calls; reported by Shane Mueller on R-devel
+      (mailing list); later reported as PR#17976.
+
+    * .Machine has longdouble.* elements only if
+      capabilities("long.double") is true, as documented.  (Previously
+      they were included if the platform had long double identical to
+      double, as ARM does.)
+
+    * p.adjust(numeric(), n=0) now works, fixing PR#18002.
+
+    * identical(x,y) no longer prints "Unknown Type .." for typeof(x)
+      == "..." objects.
+
+    * Fix (auto-)print()ing of named complex vectors, see PR#17868 and
+      PR#18019.
+
+    * all.equal(<language>, <...>) now works, fixing PR#18029.
+
+    * as.data.frame.list(L, row.names=NULL) now behaves in line with
+      data.frame(), disregarding names of components of L, fixing
+      PR#18034, reported by Kevin Tappe.
+
+    * checkRdaFiles(ff)$version is now correct also when ff contains
+      files of different versions, thanks to a report and patch from
+      Sebastian Meyer in PR#18041.
+
+    * macOS: Quartz device live drawing could fail (no plot is shown)
+      if the system changes the drawing context after view update
+      (often the case since macOS Big Sur). System log may show
+      "CGContextDelegateCreateForContext: invalid context" error.
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.0.3:
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * On platforms using configure option --with-internal-tzcode,
+      additional values "internal" and (on macOS only) "macOS" are
+      accepted for the environment variable TZDIR.  (See ?TZDIR.)
+
+      On macOS, "macOS" is used by default if the system timezone
+      database is a newer version than that in the R installation.
+
+    * When install.packages(type = "source") fails to find a package in
+      a repository it mentions package versions which are excluded by
+      their R version requirement and links to hints on why a package
+      might not be found.
+
+    * The default value for options("timeout") can be set from
+      environment variable R_DEFAULT_INTERNET_TIMEOUT, still defaulting
+      to 60 (seconds) if that is not set or invalid.
+
+      This may be needed when child R processes are doing downloads,
+      for example during the installation of source packages which
+      download jars or other forms of data.
+
+  LINK-TIME OPTIMIZATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:
+
+    * There is now support for parallelized Link-Time Optimization
+      (LTO) with GCC and for 'thin' LTO with clang _via_ setting the
+      LTO macro.
+
+    * There is support for setting a different LTO flag for the Fortran
+      compiler, including to empty when mixing clang and gfortran (as
+      on macOS).  See file config.site.
+
+    * There is a new LTO_LD macro to set linker options for LTO
+      compilation, for example to select an alternative linker or to
+      parallelize thin LTO.
+
+  DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
+
+    * The LINPACK argument to chol.default(), chol2inv(),
+      solve.default() and svd() has been defunct since R 3.1.0.  Using
+      it now gives a warning which will become an error in R 4.1.0.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * The code mitigating stack overflow with PCRE regexps on very long
+      strings is enabled for PCRE2 < 10.30 also when JIT is enabled,
+      since stack overflows have been seen in that case.
+
+    * Fix to correctly show the group labels in dotchart() (which where
+      lost in the ylab improvement for R 4.0.0).
+
+    * addmargins(*, ..) now also works when fn() is a local function,
+      thanks to bug report and patch PR#17124 from Alex Bertram.
+
+    * rank(x) and hence sort(x) now work when x is an object (as per
+      is.object(x)) of type "raw" _and_ provides a valid `[` method,
+      e.g., for gmp::as.bigz(.) numbers.
+
+    * chisq.test(*, simulate.p.value=TRUE) and r2dtable() now work
+      correctly for large table entries (in the millions).  Reported by
+      Sebastian Meyer and investigated by more helpers in PR#16184.
+
+    * Low-level socket read/write operations have been fixed to
+      correctly signal communication errors. Previously, such errors
+      could lead to a segfault due to invalid memory access. Reported
+      and debugged by Dmitriy Selivanov in PR#17850.
+
+    * quantile(x, pr) works more consistently for pr values slightly
+      outside [0,1], thanks to Suharto Anggono's PR#17891.
+
+      Further, quantile(x, prN, names=FALSE) now works even when prN
+      contains NAs, thanks to Anggono's PR#17892.  Ditto for ordered
+      factors or Date objects when type = 1 or 3, thanks to PR#17899.
+
+    * Libcurl-based internet access, including curlGetHeaders(), was
+      not respecting the "timeout" option.  If this causes
+      unanticipated timeouts, consider increasing the default by
+      setting R_DEFAULT_INTERNET_TIMEOUT.
+
+    * as.Date(<char>) now also works with an initial "", thanks to
+      Michael Chirico's PR#17909.
+
+    * isS3stdGeneric(f) now detects an S3 generic also when it is
+      trace()d, thanks to Gabe Becker's PR#17917.
+
+    * R_allocLD() has been fixed to return memory aligned for long
+      double type PR#16534.
+
+    * fisher.test() no longer segfaults when called again after its
+      internal stack has been exceeded PR#17904.
+
+    * Accessing a long vector represented by a compact integer sequence
+      no longer segfaults (reported and debugged by Hugh Parsonage).
+
+    * duplicated() now works also for strings with multiple encodings
+      inside a single vector PR#17809.
+
+    * phyper(11, 15, 0, 12, log.p=TRUE) no longer gives NaN; reported
+      as PR#17271 by Alexey Stukalov.
+
+    * Fix incorrect calculation in logLik.nls() PR#16100, patch from
+      Sebastian Meyer.
+
+    * A very old bug could cause a segfault in model.matrix() when
+      terms involved logical variables.  Part of PR#17879.
+
+    * model.frame.default() allowed data = 1, leading to involuntary
+      variable capture (rest of PR#17879).
+
+    * tar() no longer skips non-directory files, thanks to a patch by
+      Sebastian Meyer, fixing the remaining part of PR#16716.
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.0.2:
+
+  UTILITIES:
+
+    * R CMD check skips vignette re-building (with a warning) if the
+      VignetteBuilder package(s) are not available.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * Paths with non-ASCII characters caused problems for package
+      loading on Windows PR#17833.
+
+    * Using tcltk widgets no longer crashes R on Windows.
+
+    * source(*, echo=TRUE) no longer fails in some cases with empty
+      lines; reported by Bill Dunlap in PR#17769.
+
+    * on.exit() now correctly matches named arguments, thanks to
+      PR#17815 (including patch) by Brodie Gaslam.
+
+    * regexpr(*, perl=TRUE) no longer returns incorrect positions into
+      text containing characters outside of the Unicode Basic
+      Multilingual Plane on Windows.
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.0.1:
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * paste() and paste0() gain a new optional argument recycle0.  When
+      set to true, zero-length arguments are recycled leading to
+      character(0) after the sep-concatenation, i.e., to the empty
+      string "" if collapse is a string and to the zero-length value
+      character(0) when collapse = NULL.
+
+      A package whose code uses this should depend on R (>= 4.0.1).
+
+    * The summary(<warnings>) method now maps the counts correctly to
+      the warning messages.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * aov(frml, ...) now also works where the formula deparses to more
+      than 500 characters, thanks to a report and patch proposal by Jan
+      Hauffa.
+
+    * Fix a dozen places (code, examples) as Sys.setlocale() returns
+      the new rather than the previous setting.
+
+    * Fix for adding two complex grid units via sum().  Thanks to Gu
+      Zuguang for the report and Thomas Lin Pedersen for the patch.
+
+    * Fix parallel::mclapply(..., mc.preschedule=FALSE) to handle raw
+      vector results correctly. PR#17779
+
+    * Computing the base value, i.e., 2, "everywhere", now uses
+      FLT_RADIX, as the original machar code looped indefinitely on the
+      ppc64 architecture for the longdouble case.
+
+    * In R 4.0.0, sort.list(x) when is.object(x) was true, e.g., for x
+      <- I(letters), was accidentally using method = "radix".
+      Consequently, e.g., merge(<data.frame>) was much slower than
+      previously; reported in PR#17794.
+
+    * plot(y ~ x, ylab = quote(y[i])) now works, as e.g., for xlab;
+      related to PR#10525.
+
+    * parallel::detect.cores(all.tests = TRUE) tries a matching OS name
+      before the other tests (which were intended only for unknown
+      OSes).
+
+    * Parse data for raw strings is now recorded correctly. Reported by
+      Gabor Csardi.
+
+CHANGES IN R 4.0.0:
+
+  SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:
+
+    * Packages need to be (re-)installed under this version (4.0.0) of
+      R.
+
+    * matrix objects now also inherit from class "array", so e.g.,
+      class(diag(1)) is c("matrix", "array").  This invalidates code
+      incorrectly assuming that class(matrix_obj)) has length one.
+
+      S3 methods for class "array" are now dispatched for matrix
+      objects.
+
+    * There is a new syntax for specifying _raw_ character constants
+      similar to the one used in C++: r"(...)" with ... any character
+      sequence not containing the sequence )".  This makes it easier to
+      write strings that contain backslashes or both single and double
+      quotes.  For more details see ?Quotes.
+
+    * R now uses a stringsAsFactors = FALSE default, and hence by
+      default no longer converts strings to factors in calls to
+      data.frame() and read.table().
+
+      A large number of packages relied on the previous behaviour and
+      so have needed/will need updating.
+
+    * The plot() S3 generic function is now in package base rather than
+      package graphics, as it is reasonable to have methods that do not
+      use the graphics package.  The generic is currently re-exported
+      from the graphics namespace to allow packages importing it from
+      there to continue working, but this may change in future.
+
+      Packages which define S4 generics for plot() should be
+      re-installed and package code using such generics from other
+      packages needs to ensure that they are imported rather than rely
+      on their being looked for on the search path (as in a namespace,
+      the base namespace has precedence over the search path).
+
+  REFERENCE COUNTING:
+
+    * Reference counting is now used instead of the NAMED mechanism for
+      determining when objects can be safely mutated in base C code.
+      This reduces the need for copying in some cases and should allow
+      further optimizations in the future.  It should help make the
+      internal code easier to maintain.
+
+      This change is expected to have almost no impact on packages
+      using supported coding practices in their C/C++ code.
+
+  MIGRATION TO PCRE2:
+
+    * This version of R is built against the PCRE2 library for
+      Perl-like regular expressions, if available.  (On non-Windows
+      platforms PCRE1 can optionally be used if PCRE2 is not available
+      at build time.)  The version of PCRE in use can be obtained _via_
+      extSoftVersion(): PCRE1 (formerly known as 'PCRE') has versions
+      <= 8, PCRE2 versions >= 10.
+
+    * Making PCRE2 available when building R from source is strongly
+      recommended (preferably version 10.30 or later) as PCRE1 is no
+      longer developed: version 8.44 is 'likely to be the final
+      release'.
+
+    * PCRE2 reports errors for some regular expressions that were
+      accepted by PCRE1.  A hyphen now has to be escaped in a character
+      class to be interpreted as a literal (unless first or last in the
+      class definition).  \R, \B and \X are no longer allowed in
+      character classes (PCRE1 treated these as literals).
+
+    * Option PCRE_study is no longer used with PCRE2, and is reported
+      as FALSE when that is in use.
+
+  NEW FEATURES:
+
+    * assertError() and assertWarning() (in package tools) can now
+      check for _specific_ error or warning classes _via_ the new
+      optional second argument classes (which is not back compatible
+      with previous use of an unnamed second argument).
+
+    * DF2formula(), the utility for the data frame method of formula(),
+      now works without parsing and explicit evaluation, starting from
+      Suharto Anggono's suggestion in PR#17555.
+
+    * approxfun() and approx() gain a new argument na.rm defaulting to
+      true.  If set to false, missing y values now propagate into the
+      interpolated values.
+
+    * Long vectors are now supported as the seq argument of a for()
+      loop.
+
+    * str(x) gets a new deparse.lines option with a default to speed it
+      up when x is a large call object.
+
+    * The internal traceback object produced when an error is signalled
+      (.Traceback), now contains the calls rather than the _deparse()d_
+      calls, deferring the deparsing to the user-level functions
+      .traceback() and traceback().  This fulfils the wish of PR#17580,
+      reported including two patch proposals by Brodie Gaslam.
+
+    * data.matrix() now converts character columns to factors and from
+      this to integers.
+
+    * package.skeleton() now explicitly lists all exports in the
+      NAMESPACE file.
+
+    * New function .S3method() to register S3 methods in R scripts.
+
+    * file.path() has some support for file paths not in the session
+      encoding, e.g. with UTF-8 inputs in a non-UTF-8 locale the output
+      is marked as UTF-8.
+
+    * Most functions with file-path inputs will give an explicit error
+      if a file-path input in a marked encoding cannot be translated
+      (to the native encoding or in some cases on Windows to UTF-8),
+      rather than translate to a different file path using escapes.
+      Some (such as dir.exists(), file.exists(), file.access(),
+      file.info(), list.files(), normalizePath() and path.expand())
+      treat this like any other non-existent file, often with a
+      warning.
+
+    * There is a new help document accessed by help("file path
+      encoding") detailing how file paths with marked encodings are
+      handled.
+
+    * New function list2DF() for creating data frames from lists of
+      variables.
+
+    * iconv() has a new option sub = "Unicode" to translate UTF-8 input
+      invalid in the to encoding using <U+xxxx> escapes.
+
+    * There is a new function infoRDS() providing information about the
+      serialization format of a serialized object.
+
+    * S3 method lookup now by default skips the elements of the search
+      path between the global and base environments.
+
+    * Added an argument add_datalist(*, small.size = 0) to allow the
+      creation of a data/datalist file even when the total size of the
+      data sets is small.
+
+    * The backquote function bquote() has a new argument splice to
+      enable splicing a computed list of values into an expression,
+      like ,@ in LISP's backquote.
+
+    * The formula interface to t.test() and wilcox.test() has been
+      extended to handle one-sample and paired tests.
+
+    * The palette() function has a new default set of colours (which
+      are less saturated and have better accessibility properties).
+      There are also some new built-in palettes, which are listed by
+      the new palette.pals() function.  These include the old default
+      palette under the name "R3". Finally, the new palette.colors()
+      function allows a subset of colours to be selected from any of
+      the built-in palettes.
+
+    * n2mfrow() gains an option asp = 1 to specify the aspect ratio,
+      fulfilling the wish and extending the proposal of Michael Chirico
+      in PR#17648.
+
+    * For head(x, n) and tail() the default and other S3 methods
+      notably for _vector_ n, e.g. to get a "corner" of a matrix, has
+      been extended to array's of higher dimension thanks to the patch
+      proposal by Gabe Becker in PR#17652.  Consequently, optional
+      argument addrownums is deprecated and replaced by the (more
+      general) argument keepnums.  An invalid second argument n now
+      leads to typically more easily readable error messages.
+
+    * New function .class2() provides the full character vector of
+      class names used for S3 method dispatch.
+
+    * Printing methods(..) now uses a new format() method.
+
+    * sort.list(x) now works for non-atomic objects x and method =
+      "auto" (the default) or "radix" in cases order(x) works,
+      typically via a xtfrm() method.
+
+    * Where they are available, writeBin() allows long vectors.
+
+    * New function deparse1() produces one string, wrapping deparse(),
+      to be used typically in deparse1(substitute(*)), e.g., to fix
+      PR#17671.
+
+    * wilcox.test() enhancements: In the (non-paired) two-sample case,
+      Inf values are treated as very large for robustness consistency.
+      If exact computations are used, the result now has "exact" in the
+      method element of its return value.  New arguments tol.root and
+      digits.rank where the latter may be used for stability to treat
+      very close numbers as ties.
+
+    * readBin() and writeBin() now report an error for an invalid
+      endian value.  The affected code needs to be fixed with care as
+      the old undocumented behavior was to swap endian-ness in such
+      cases.
+
+    * sequence() is now an S3 generic with an internally implemented
+      default method, and gains arguments to generate more complex
+      sequences.  Based on code from the S4Vectors Bioconductor package
+      and the advice of Herv? Pag?s.
+
+    * print()'s default method and many other methods (by calling the
+      default eventually and passing ...) now make use of a new
+      optional width argument, avoiding the need for the user to set
+      and reset options("width").
+
+    * memDecompress() supports the RFC 1952 format (e.g. in-memory
+      copies of gzip-compressed files) as well as RFC 1950.
+
+    * memCompress() and memDecompress() support long raw vectors for
+      types "gzip" and "zx".
+
+    * sweep() and slice.index() can now use names of dimnames for their
+      MARGIN argument (apply has had this for almost a decade).
+
+    * New function proportions() and marginSums(). These should replace
+      the unfortunately named prop.table() and margin.table(). They are
+      drop-in replacements, but also add named-margin functionality.
+      The old function names are retained as aliases for
+      back-compatibility.
+
+    * Functions rbinom(), rgeom(), rhyper(), rpois(), rnbinom(),
+      rsignrank() and rwilcox() which have returned integer since R
+      3.0.0 and hence NA when the numbers would have been outside the
+      integer range, now return double vectors (without NAs, typically)
+      in these cases.
+
+    * matplot(x,y) (and hence matlines() and matpoints()) now call the
+      corresponding methods of plot() and lines(), e.g, when x is a
+      "Date" or "POSIXct" object; prompted by Spencer Graves'
+      suggestion.
+
+    * stopifnot() now allows customizing error messages via argument
+      names, thanks to a patch proposal by Neal Fultz in PR#17688.
+
+    * unlink() gains a new argument expand to disable wildcard and
+      tilde expansion.  Elements of x of value "~" are now ignored.
+
+    * mle() in the stats4 package has had its interface extended so
+      that arguments to the negative log-likelihood function can be one
+      or more vectors, with similar conventions applying to bounds,
+      start values, and parameter values to be kept fixed.  This
+      required a minor extension to class "mle", so saved objects from
+      earlier versions may need to be recomputed.
+
+    * The default for pdf() is now useDingbats = FALSE.
+
+    * The default fill colour for hist() and boxplot() is now col =
+      "lightgray".
+
+    * The default order of the levels on the y-axis for spineplot() and
+      cdplot() has been reversed.
+
+    * If the R_ALWAYS_INSTALL_TESTS environment variable is set to a
+      true value, R CMD INSTALL behaves as if the --install-tests
+      option is always specified. Thanks to Reinhold Koch for the
+      suggestion.
+
+    * New function R_user_dir() in package tools suggests paths
+      appropriate for storing R-related user-specific data,
+      configuration and cache files.
+
+    * capabilities() gains a new logical option Xchk to avoid warnings
+      about X11-related capabilities.
+
+    * The internal implementation of grid units has changed, but the
+      only visible effects at user-level should be
+
+        * a slightly different print format for some units (especially
+          unit arithmetic),
+
+        * faster performance (for unit operations) and
+
+        * two new functions unitType() and unit.psum().
+
+      Based on code contributed by Thomas Lin Pedersen.
+
+    * When internal dispatch for rep.int() and rep_len() fails, there
+      is an attempt to dispatch on the equivalent call to rep().
+
+    * Object .Machine now contains new longdouble.* entries (when R
+      uses long doubles internally).
+
+    * news() has been enhanced to cover the news on R 3.x and 2.x.
+
+    * For consistency, N <- NULL; N[[1]] <- val now turns N into a list
+      also when val) has length one.  This enables dimnames(r1)[[1]] <-
+      "R1" for a 1-row matrix r1, fixing PR#17719 reported by Serguei
+      Sokol.
+
+    * deparse(..), dump(..), and dput(x, control = "all") now include
+      control option "digits17" which typically ensures 1:1
+      invertibility.  New option control = "exact" ensures numeric
+      exact invertibility via "hexNumeric".
+
+    * When loading data sets via read.table(), data() now uses
+      LC_COLLATE=C to ensure locale-independent results for possible
+      string-to-factor conversions.
+
+    * A server socket connection, a new connection type representing a
+      listening server socket, is created via serverSocket() and can
+      accept multiple socket connections via socketAccept().
+
+    * New function socketTimeout() changes the connection timeout of a
+      socket connection.
+
+    * The time needed to start a homogeneous PSOCK cluster on localhost
+      with many nodes has been significantly reduced (package
+      parallel).
+
+    * New globalCallingHandlers() function to establish global
+      condition handlers.  This allows registering default handlers for
+      specific condition classes. Developed in collaboration with
+      Lionel Henry.
+
+    * New function tryInvokeRestart() to invoke a specified restart if
+      one is available and return without signaling an error if no such
+      restart is found.  Contributed by Lionel Henry in PR#17598.
+
+    * str(x) now shows the length of attributes in some cases for a
+      data frame x.
+
+    * Rprof() gains a new argument filter.callframes to request that
+      intervening call frames due to lazy evaluation or explicit eval()
+      calls be omitted from the recorded profile data.  Contributed by
+      Lionel Henry in PR#17595.
+
+    * The handling of ${FOO-bar} and ${FOO:-bar} in Renviron files now
+      follows POSIX shells (at least on a Unix-alike), so the first
+      treats empty environment variables as set and the second does
+      not.  Previously both ignored empty variables.  There are several
+      uses of the first form in etc/Renviron.
+
+    * New classes argument for suppressWarnings() and
+      suppressMessages() to selectively suppress only warnings or
+      messages that inherit from particular classes.  Based on patch
+      from Lionel Henry submitted with PR#17619.
+
+    * New function activeBindingFunction() retrieves the function of an
+      active binding.
+
+    * New "cairoFT" and "pango" components in the output of
+      grSoftVersion().
+
+    * New argument symbolfamily in cairo-based graphics devices and new
+      function cairoSymbolFont() that can be used to provide the value
+      for that argument.
+
+  Windows:
+
+    * Rterm now works also when invoked from MSYS2 terminals.  Line
+      editing is possible when command winpty is installed.
+
+    * normalizePath() now resolves symbolic links and normalizes case
+      of long names of path elements in case-insensitive folders
+      (PR#17165).
+
+    * md5sum() supports UTF-8 file names with characters that cannot be
+      translated to the native encoding (PR#17633).
+
+    * Rterm gains a new option --workspace to specify the workspace to
+      be restored.  This allows equals to be part of the name when
+      opening _via_ Windows file associations (reported by Christian
+      Asseburg).
+
+    * Rterm now accepts ALT+xxx sequences also with NumLock on.  Tilde
+      can be pasted with an Italian keyboard (PR#17679).
+
+    * R falls back to copying when junction creation fails during
+      package checking (patch from Duncan Murdoch).
+
+  DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
+
+    * Make macro F77_VISIBILITY has been removed and replaced by
+      F_VISIBILITY.
+
+    * Make macros F77, FCPIFCPLAGS and SHLIB_OPENMP_FCFLAGS have been
+      removed and replaced by FC, FPICFLAGS and SHLIB_OPENMP_FFLAGS
+      respectively.  (Most make programs will set F77 to the value of
+      FC, which is set for package compilation.  But portable code
+      should not rely on this.)
+
+    * The deprecated support for specifying C++98 for package
+      installation has been removed.
+
+    * R CMD config no longer knows about the unused settings F77 and
+      FCPIFCPLAGS, nor CXX98 and similar.
+
+    * Either PCRE2 or PCRE1 >= 8.32 (Nov 2012) is required: the
+      deprecated provision for 8.20-8.31 has been removed.
+
+    * Defunct functions mem.limits(), .readRDS(), .saveRDS(),
+      .find.package(), and .path.package() from package base and
+      allGenerics(), getAccess(), getAllMethods(), getClassName(),
+      getClassPackage(), getExtends(), getProperties(), getPrototype(),
+      getSubclasses(), getVirtual(), mlistMetaName(),
+      removeMethodsObject(), seemsS4Object(), traceOff(), and traceOn()
+      from methods have been removed.
+
+  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:
+
+    * installChar is now remapped in Rinternals.h to installTrChar, of
+      which it has been a wrapper since R 3.6.0.  Neither are part of
+      the API, but packages using installChar can replace it if they
+      depend on R >= 3.6.2.
+
+    * Header R_ext/Print.h defines R_USE_C99_IN_CXX and hence exposes
+      Rvprintf and REvprintf if used with a C++11 (or later) compiler.
+
+    * There are new Fortran subroutines dblepr1, realpr1 and intpr1 to
+      print a scalar variable (gfortran 10 enforces the distinction
+      between scalars and length-one arrays).  Also labelpr to print
+      just a label.
+
+    * R_withCallingErrorHandler is now available for establishing a
+      calling handler in C code for conditions inheriting from class
+      error.
+
+  INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:
+
+    * User-set DEFS (e.g., in config.site) is now used for compiling
+      packages (including base packages).
+
+    * There is a new variant option --enable-lto=check for checking
+      consistency of BLAS/LAPACK/LINPACK calls - see 'Writing R
+      Extensions'.
+
+    * A C++ compiler default is set only if the C++11 standard is
+      supported: it no longer falls back to C++98.
+
+    * PCRE2 is used if available.  To make use of PCRE1 if PCRE2 is
+      unavailable, configure with option --with-pcre1.
+
+    * The minimum required version of libcurl is now 7.28.0 (Oct 2012).
+
+    * New make target distcheck checks
+
+        * R can be rebuilt from the tarball created by make dist,
+
+        * the build from the tarball passes make check-all,
+
+        * the build installs and uninstalls,
+
+        * the source files are properly cleaned by make distclean.
+
+  UTILITIES:
+
+    * R --help now mentions the option --no-echo (renamed from --slave)
+      and its previously undocumented short form -s.
+
+    * R CMD check now optionally checks configure and cleanup scripts
+      for non-Bourne-shell code ('bashisms').
+
+    * R CMD check --as-cran now runs \donttest examples (which are run
+      by example()) instead of instructing the tester to do so.  This
+      can be temporarily circumvented during development by setting
+      environment variable _R_CHECK_DONTTEST_EXAMPLES_ to a false
+      value.
+
+  PACKAGE INSTALLATION:
+
+    * There is the beginnings of support for the recently approved
+      C++20 standard, specified analogously to C++14 and C++17.  There
+      is currently only limited support for this in compilers, with
+      flags such as -std=c++20 and -std=c++2a.  For the time being the
+      configure test is of accepting one of these flags and compiling
+      C++17 code.
+
+  BUG FIXES:
+
+    * formula(x) with length(x) > 1 character vectors, is deprecated
+      now.  Such use has been rare, and has 'worked' as expected in
+      some cases only.  In other cases, wrong x have silently been
+      truncated, not detecting previous errors.
+
+    * Long-standing issue where the X11 device could lose events
+      shortly after startup has been addressed (PR#16702).
+
+    * The data.frame method for rbind() no longer drops <NA> levels
+      from factor columns by default (PR#17562).
+
+    * available.packages() and hence install.packages() now pass their
+      ... argument to download.file(), fulfilling the wish of PR#17532;
+      subsequently, available.packages() gets new argument quiet,
+      solving PR#17573.
+
+    * stopifnot() gets new argument exprObject to allow an R object of
+      class expression (or other 'language') to work more consistently,
+      thanks to suggestions by Suharto Anggono.
+
+    * conformMethod() now works correctly in cases containing a "&&
+      logic" bug, reported by Henrik Bengtsson.  It now creates methods
+      with "missing" entries in the signature.  Consequently,
+      rematchDefinition() is amended to use appropriate .local() calls
+      with named arguments where needed.
+
+    * format.default(*, scientific = FALSE) now corresponds to a
+      practically most extreme options(scipen = n) setting rather than
+      arbitrary n = 100.
+
+    * format(as.symbol("foo")) now works (returning "foo").
+
+    * postscript(.., title = *) now signals an error when the title
+      string contains a character which would produce corrupt
+      PostScript, thanks to PR#17607 by Daisuko Ogawa.
+
+    * Certain Ops (notably comparison such as ==) now also work for
+      0-length data frames, after reports by Hilmar Berger.
+
+    * methods(class = class(glm(..))) now warns more usefully and only
+      once.
+
+    * write.dcf() no longer mangles field names (PR#17589).
+
+    * Primitive replacement functions no longer mutate a referenced
+      first argument when used outside of a complex assignment context.
+
+    * A better error message for contour(*, levels = Inf).
+
+    * The return value of contourLines() is no longer invisible().
+
+    * The Fortran code for calculating the coefficients component in
+      lm.influence() was very inefficient. It has (for now) been
+      replaced with much faster R code (PR#17624).
+
+    * cm.colors(n) _etc_ no longer append the code for alpha = 1, "FF",
+      to all colors.  Hence all eight *.colors() functions and
+      rainbow() behave consistently and have the same non-explicit
+      default (PR#17659).
+
+    * dnorm had a problematic corner case with sd == -Inf or negative
+      sd which was not flagged as an error in all cases. Thanks to
+      Stephen D. Weigand for reporting and Wang Jiefei for analyzing
+      this; similar change has been made in dlnorm().
+
+    * The optional iter.smooth argument of plot.lm(), (the plot()
+      method for lm and glm fits) now defaults to 0 for all glm fits.
+      Especially for binary observations with high or low fitted
+      probabilities, this effectively deleted all observations of 1 or
+      0.  Also, the type of residuals used in the glm case has been
+      switched to "pearson" since deviance residuals do not in general
+      have approximately zero mean.
+
+    * In plot.lm, Cook's distance was computed from unweighted
+      residuals, leading to inconsistencies.  Replaced with usual
+      weighted version. (PR#16056)
+
+    * Time-series ts(*, start, end, frequency) with fractional
+      frequency are supported more consistently; thanks to a report
+      from Johann Kleinbub and analysis and patch by Duncan Murdoch in
+      PR#17669.
+
+    * In case of errors mcmapply() now preserves attributes of returned
+      "try-error" objects and avoids simplification, overriding
+      SIMPLIFY to FALSE. (PR#17653)
+
+    * as.difftime() gets new optional tz = "UTC" argument which should
+      fix behaviour during daylight-savings-changeover days, fixing
+      PR#16764, thanks to proposals and analysis by Johannes Ranke and
+      Kirill M?ller.
+
+    * round() does a better job of rounding _"to nearest"_ by
+      _measuring_ and _"to even"_; thanks to a careful algorithm
+      originally prompted by the report from Adam Wheeler and then
+      others, in PR#17668.
+      round(x, dig) for _negative_ digits is much more rational now,
+      notably for large |dig|.
+
+    * Inheritance information on S4 classes is maintained more
+      consistently, particularly in the case of class unions (in part
+      due to PR#17596 and a report from Ezra Tucker).
+
+    * is() behaves more robustly when its argument class2 is a
+      classRepresentation object.
+
+    * The warning message when attempting to export an nonexistent
+      class is now more readable; thanks to Thierry Onkelinx for
+      recognizing the problem.
+
+    * choose() misbehaved in corner cases where it switched n - k for k
+      and n was only _nearly_ integer (report from Erik Scott Wright).
+
+    * mle() in the stats4 package had problems combining use of box
+      constraints and fixed starting values (in particular, confidence
+      intervals were affected).
+
+    * Operator ? now has lower precedence than = to work as documented,
+      so = behaves like <- in help expressions (PR#16710).
+
+    * smoothEnds(x) now returns integer type in _both_ cases when x is
+      integer, thanks to a report and proposal by Bill Dunlap PR#17693.
+
+    * The methods package does a better job of tracking inheritance
+      relationships across packages.
+
+    * norm(diag(c(1, NA)), "2") now works.
+
+    * subset() had problems with 0-col dataframes (reported by Bill
+      Dunlap, PR#17721).
+
+    * Several cases of integer overflow detected by the 'undefined
+      behaviour sanitizer' of clang 10 have been circumvented.  One in
+      rhyper() may change the generated value for large input values.
+
+    * dotchart() now places the y-axis label (ylab) much better, not
+      overplotting labels, thanks to a report and suggestion by Alexey
+      Shipunov.
+
+    * A rare C-level array overflow in chull() has been worked around.
+
+    * Some invalid specifications of the day-of-the-year (_via_ %j,
+      e.g. day 366 in 2017) or week plus day-of-the-week are now
+      detected by strptime().  They now return NA but give a warning as
+      they may have given random results or corrupted memory in earlier
+      versions of R.
+
+    * socketConnection(server = FALSE) now respects the connection
+      timeout also on Linux.
+
+    * socketConnection(server = FALSE) no longer leaks a connection
+      that is available right away without waiting (e.g. on localhost).
+
+    * Socket connections are now robust against spurious readability
+      and spurious availability of an incoming connection.
+
+    * blocking = FALSE is now respected also on the server side of a
+      socket connection, allowing non-blocking read operations.
+
+    * anova.glm() and anova.glmlist() computed incorrect score (Rao)
+      tests in no-intercept cases. (Andr? Gillibert, PR#17735)
+
+    * summaryRprof() now should work correctly for the Rprof(*,
+      memory.profiling=TRUE) case with small chunk size (and "tseries"
+      or similar) thanks to a patch proposal by Benjamin Tyner, in
+      PR#15886.
+
+    * xgettext() ignores strings passed to ngettext(), since the latter
+      is handled by xngettext(). Thanks to Daniele Medri for the report
+      and all the recent work he has done on the Italian translations.
+
+    * data(package = "P") for P in base and stats no longer reports the
+      data sets from package datasets (which it did for back
+      compatibility for 16 years), fixing PR#17730.
+
+    * x[[Inf]] (returning NULL) no longer leads to undefined behavior,
+      thanks to a report by Kirill M?ller in PR#17756.  Further,
+      x[[-Inf]] and x[[-n]] now give more helpful error messages.
+
+    * Gamma() family sometimes had trouble storing link name PR#15891
+
+  BUG FIXES (Windows):
+
+    * Sys.glob() now supports all characters from the Unicode Basic
+      Multilingual Plane, no longer corrupting some (less commonly
+      used) characters (PR#17638).
+
+    * Rterm now correctly displays multi-byte-coded characters
+      representable in the current native encoding (at least on Windows
+      10 they were sometimes omitted, PR#17632).
+
+    * scan() issues with UTF-8 data when running in a DBCS locale have
+      been resolved (PR#16520, PR#16584).
+
+    * Rterm now accepts enhanced/arrow keys also with ConPTY.
+
+    * R can now be started _via_ the launcher icon in a user documents
+      directory whose path is not representable in the system encoding.
+
+    * socketConnection(server = FALSE) now returns instantly also on
+      Windows when connection failure is signalled.
+
+    * Problems with UTF-16 surrogate pairs have been fixed in several
+      functions, including tolower() and toupper() (PR#17645).
+
+CHANGES in previous versions:
+
+  * Older news can be found in text format in files NEWS.0, NEWS.1,
+    NEWS.2 and NEWS.3 in the doc directory.  News in HTML format for R
+    versions 3.x and from 2.10.0 to 2.15.3 are available at
+    doc/html/NEWS.3.html and doc/html/NEWS.2.html.
+