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://⁠ ’ URI s 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://⁠ ’ URI s for both download.file and url . On Windows, method = "wininet" is deprecated for ‘ ⁠http://⁠ ’, ‘ ⁠https://⁠ ’ and ‘ ⁠ftp://⁠ ’ URI s for both download.file and url . (A warning is only given for ‘ ⁠ftp://⁠ ’.) For ‘ ⁠ftp://⁠ ’ URI s the default method is now "libcurl" if available (which it is on CRAN builds). method = "wininet" remains the default for ‘ ⁠http://⁠ ’ and ‘ ⁠https://⁠ ’ URI s 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 erro