[R-pkgs] Revised versions of the maptools and sp packages

[Roger Bivand]

Revised versions of maptools, a package for reading geographical data from
shapefiles, and sp, a package with classes and methods for spatial data
handling, have been released on CRAN. They are maptools release 0.5-1 and
sp release 0.8-1.

The maptools package now depends on sp (>= 0.8), so that users of maptools
will need both to update the package itself, and to install the sp
package. All previous maptools classes and functions are still available,
but users are encouraged to try out the cleaner and more robust versions
in sp.

Further details of changes (particularly incompatible changes in sp) are
available on the R-sig-geo mailing list (see the "Spatial" task view on
CRAN), and at http://r-spatial.sourceforge.net

-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no