o The "data.frame" and "factor" methods for [[ now support the 'exact' argument introduced in 2.6.0.
o plot.lm() gains a new argument 'cex.caption' to allow the size of the captions to be controlled.
o A series of changes make the CHARSXP cache introduced in 2.6.0 faster (and in some cases many times faster) in sessions with a large number (e.g. a million) of unique character strings, and also if there are many empty strings.
o embedFonts(), bitmap() and dev2bitmap() explicitly turn off auto-rotation in Ghostscript when generating PDF.
o The canonical architecture is no longer checked when loading packages using a non-empty sub-architecture, since it is possible to (e.g.) build packages for i386-pc-linux-gnu on both that architecture and on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.
o Deparsing will (if option warnIncomplete is set) warn on strings longer than the parser limit (8192 bytes).
o url() now uses the UserAgent header in http transactions in the same way as download.file() (making use of option "HTTPUserAgent").
BUG FIXES
o iconv() is again able to translate character strings with embedded nuls (such as those in UCS-2).
o new.packages() and update.packages() failed when called on an empty library, since old.packages() threw an error. old.packages() now returns NULL (as documented) in that case.
o Builds on Mac OS X 10.4 or higher now allocate enough space in the binary headers to relocate dependent libraries into the framework.
o R CMD build now computes the exclusion list on the copy it makes: this avoids problems if the original sources contain symbolic links (which are resolved in the copy). Thanks to Michael Lawrence for diagnosis and patch.
o object.size() had slightly too low a size for objects of type "S4".
o symbol() in plotmath expressions was only accepting valid character strings, which made it impossible to specify symbols such as aleph (obtained by symbol("\300")) in a UTF-8 locale.
o An event handling issue caused autorepeat functions to misbehave with tcltk (notably scrollbars).
o plot(sin, -5, 5) gives ylab 'sin(x)' again, where it resulted in 'x(x)' in 2.6.0. Further, plot(sin) again plots from [0,1] also in cases where a previously used coordinate system differs.
o curve() with unspecified 'from', 'to' and 'xlim' now reuses the previous x limits, and not slightly larger ones.
o It was intended that R code filenames in packages should start with an ASCII letter or digits (and R CMD INSTALL uses that), but the test used in R CMD build ([A-Za-z0-9]) was locale-specific (and excluded t to y in Estonian, for example). (PR#10351)
o 'R CMD build' could misbehave when faced with files with CRLF line endings *and* no line ending on the final line of the file, removing the last byte of the file.
o DF[i, j] failed in 2.6.0 if j was a logical vector selecting a single column.
o Unix x11() would fail if a valid 'display' was specified but DISPLAY was unset. (PR#10379)
o postscript() was not always ignoring .Postscript.Options in the workspace (where it should not have occurred).
o help.search() would give an error if it found a badly installed package, even if 'package' was not specified.
o tclServiceMode() (package tcltk) now works under Unix-alikes. (Although documented, it used only to work under Windows.)
o As Mac OS X 10.5.0 comes with incompatible /bin/sh shell, we force SHELL=/bin/bash (which is ok) in that case. [Only for 2.6.x: another solution is used in 2.7.0.]
o Deliberately using malformed source attributes no longer causes deparsing/printing of functions to crash R. (PR#10437)
o R CMD check and R CMD INSTALL now work with (some) directory names containing spaces.
o choose(n, k) gave incorrect values for negative n and small k.
o plot.ts(x,y) could use wrong default labels; fixed thanks to Antonio, Fabio di Narzo.
o reshape() got column names out of sync with contents in some cases; found by Antonio, Fabio Di Narzo.
o ar(x) for short 'x' (i.e. length <= 10) could fail because the default 'order.max' was >= length(x) which is non-sensical.
o Keyboard events in getGraphicsEvent() could cause stack imbalance errors (PR#10453)