[R-sig-Geo] New release of spdep package depends on Matrix

[Roger Bivand]

Release 0.4-1 of the spdep package is now on CRAN, and Windows amd MacOS X 
binaries will follow shortly. Please note that spdep now depends on the 
Matrix package, with SparseM as a suggested package. 

This is because the Matrix package is becoming more central in R
generally, and SparseM is moving closer to Matrix too. Matrix classes and
methods are used for handling sparse matrices. The change means that
simply updating spdep will not be enough if users have not installed
Matrix - if Matrix is not among your installed packages, and you are
updating spdep, please install Matrix first. The SparseM code has been
retained, but users should load SparseM themselves.

If:

length(grep("Matrix", rownames(installed.packages()))) == 0

you need to:

install.packages("Matrix")

In addition, the majority of the included data sets are now also provided 
as shapefiles and GAL contiguity files, so that it is easier to see how to 
reproduce analyses with one's own data.

Please let me know on or off this list if there are updating problems.

-- 
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