As promised, the latest patch to R is out with the release of R 2.12.1, as announced today by the R Core Team. If you build R yourself, sources are available now at your local CRAN mirror, and binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux will be available in the next few days. There are a few new features:

• The DVI/PDF reference manual now includes the help pages for all the standard packages: splines, stats4 and tcltk were previously omitted (intentionally).
• http://www.rforge.net has been added to the default set of repositories known to setRepositories().
• xz-utils has been updated to version 5.0.0.
• reshape() now makes use of sep when forming names during reshaping to wide format. (PR#14435)
• legend() allows the length of lines to be set by the end user via the new argument seg.len.
• New reference class utility methods copy(), field(), getRefClass() and getClass() have been added.
• When a character value is used for the EXPR argument in switch(), a warning is given if more than one unnamed alternative value is given. This will become an error in R 2.13.0.
• StructTS(type = “BSM”) now allows series with just two seasons. (Reported by Birgit Erni.)

In addition, several minor bugs have been fixed — you can see a list in the NEWS file or the announcement linked below.

r-announce mailing list: R 2.12.1 is released