[R-sig-Geo] Where is the Changelog of maptools?

[Roger Bivand]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Susumu Tanimura wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> It is happy to see version-up of maptools.  I admire Roger's work.
> 
> However the change-log that may describe the improvement of maptools
> was not found.  Is not there system to inform the difference in R
> package?

Thanks a lot for this comment - implemented in maptools_0.4-5, sent to 
CRAN/incoming this morning, should be available before long. The solution 
is a file called "changes" in inst/ in the source package, in the package 
root when installed, and accessed by maptools(changes=TRUE); it may be 
improved internally, but the access function should continue to look like 
this. 

The recent changes have been caused by stress-testing with strange
shapefiles, with 0.4-4 trying to avoid occasional crashes under Windows
(re-writing C code for interfacing shapelib functions) and 0.4-5 removing
a buffer overflow when DBF files had character fields wider than 50
characters.

Please bear with me on these changes - the longer-term goal is to read 
point shapefiles into an S4 class SpatialDataFrame and polygons into 
SpatialDataFramePolygons as documented in the alpha "sp" package on 
sourcefourge under "r-spatial", but S3 maptools will continue to be 
supported even when the more robust S4 version is released to CRAN (about 
September/October). Should we try to post a roadmap on sourceforge? - I 
would encourage people to look at "sp" and report your experiences.

Roger


> 
> --
> Susumu Tanimura
> <stanimura-ngs at umin.ac.jp>
> 
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-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 93 93
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no