coolbutuseless, 
I am paying close attention to the R-devel discussion on R API definition.
A package I'm working on (rmonocypher) uses connections to enable encryption in lots of useful places in R for seamless/easy data encryption.
But connection registration in R code is "non API", meaning that you can't write a new connection in a package!
The connection API has been stable for 10 years. Not sure why its use is verboten.
