[R-sig-Geo] rgdal 0.7-1 release

[Roger Bivand]

This release may cause trouble.

It has been found that an application (QGIS) plugin (SDA4P) loading R and 
rgdal through rpy2, and with QGIS linking to GDAL itself directly, has 
been occasionally seeing muddles with regard to error handling on Linux.

The CRAN Windows and CRAN extras OSX binary packages are built static, so 
don't see the problem (they have private copies of GDAL), but in order to 
try to resolve this, and following exchanges with Even Rouault, a GDAL 
developer, major changes in error handling in rgdal have been made.

Before, the R error handler was set to catch GDAL errors on the R thread 
(GDAL's error handler is said to be threaded, so rgdal pushed the R 
handler on load and popped it on unload). If the plugin loaded R on the 
same thread as QGIS, the R error handler might be seen by QGIS, instead of 
the QGIS error handler.

Now, the error handler is pushed/popped around every call to a GDAL 
function, on occasion pushed before a loop and popped after the loop.

I have contacted all maintainers of packages on CRAN depending on or 
suggesting rgdal, so that they could check whether their packages are 
affected. William Kyngesburye has been kind enough to clear some other 
issues for his R 2.13 Framework build, but reports no problems so far.

If you see issues, in particular R error exiting because the wrong error 
handler is being applied (only Linux, OSX with rgdal intalled from source 
or Frameworks, or Windows with rgdal installed from source), please 
document fully, preferably reproducibly, and report, and, until fixed, 
revert to the 0.6-* series.

Windows and OSX binaries will not be built for GDAL 1.8.0, but we'll aim 
to build with GDAL 1.8.1 sometime after its (impending) release.

All feedback welcome, including scrutiny of the changes made in the C/C++ 
source code on R-Forge.

Roger

-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, NHH Norwegian School of Economics,
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