[R-pkg-devel] how to call PROJ.4 C code in a package?

[Daniel Kelley]

The “oce” package (for oceanographic analysis) presently includes PROJ.4 C-language source code, as a way to work with map projections (see [1,2] for why I do this).  It has been suggested that a separate PROJ.4 library be used instead, and that a version of that library is available on the CRAN build machines.

I am wondering whether anyone can advise on how “oce” should hook up with this external PROJ.4 library. As explained at [3], I would prefer not to require users to download and install PROJ.4 themselves. (By the way, a strict download of the official PROJ.4 is not helpful, because it is peppered with fprintf() calls that should be Rprintf() calls, and also with exit() calls that should be error() calls.)

I have noticed that on my OSX machine, R has proj4 stored within itself, e.g.

	$ nm -g /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.2/Resources/library/proj4/libs/proj4.so | grep pj_init
	00000000000254d0 T _pj_init 	
	00000000000247c0 T _pj_init_ctx 
	0000000000025680 T _pj_init_plus 
	0000000000025510 T _pj_init_plus_ctx

and I am wondering whether I can make “oce” hook up with this. However, I don’t know if that is there just on my machine because I have the R “proj4” package installed (or perhaps “rgdal”, which also uses PROJ.4), etc.

So, the simple question is: what do you do if a CRAN team member suggests that you remove PROJ.4 source code from your package and instead use the version that is on CRAN build computers?

I hope this is fairly clear, although I realize I am being probably too wordy.  Let me add to the words by thanking those who have set up this email group. It is a wonderful addition to the R world. At the moment, the CRAN team probably uses up a great deal of time dealing with people like me who are stumbling a bit, to try to find the best way to do things.  Members of the CRAN team have been wonderfully generous to me, in pointing out things I’ve done wrong in package development, but this seems to me to be an undue burden on them. Let’s hope that package developers can help each other!

Dan Kelley / Department of Oceanography / Dalhousie University / Nova Scotia / Canada


[1] — The oce package cannot pass the map-projection work to the “proj4” package, because the proj4::project() produces an error when any point in a vector of geographical locations is “off scale” for the map projection at hand. A solution is to call proj4::project() for each point in turn, using try() to find out which results should be c(NA,NA). This is slow for datasets with many points, e.g. world coastlines

[2] — “oce” needs inverse projections, so the “mapproj” package is insufficient.

[3] — Quite a few users are at government or other sites where building packages is possible, but where they do not have permission to install new libraries (such as PROJ.4) in e.g. /usr. I don’t want such users to be cut out from using the development version of “oce”, because that makes it hard for me to fix problems that they may encounter or to add new capabilities to the development version of “oce” to allow them to do their work.