Speaking of broken, I had neither noticed that this R version now returns an additional field (for the repository) in the per-package metadata via available.packages(), nor that this change had broken my oh-so-useful and increasingly popular CRANberrries html and rss summaries of CRAN changes. So with the usual beta and rc releases or R 2.9.1 in Debian starting a week prior, CRANberries had been silent for six days from Friday the 21st to last Thursday. I rectified it once I noticed, and changed the code to no longer fall on its nose at that spot. Sorry for the few days without service.