[R-sig-Geo] Pre-GDAL 2: rgdal changes

[Roger Bivand]

The second beta of GDAL 2 is now available, and as of revision 535 on 
R-Forge, the legacy rgdal package passes R CMD check with either GDAL 
1.11.2 (or earlier) or GDAL 2.0.0 beta 2.

One or two issues are known (Integer64 in vector fields and FIDs not 
supported in R; gdalDrivers() reports both raster and vector drivers; the 
MapInfo File TAB driver doesn't work for writing, ...), but others remain 
to be discovered.

For those who need rgdal in production, and can install the 2.0.0 beta, it 
would be a really good use of time to identify issues now, rather than 
when GDAL 2 starts to become the standard, stable release. Anyone else 
needing an itch to scratch is also, of course, welcome to contribute.

The rgdal package will continue to condition on GDAL 1 or 2, so hopefully 
those users who do not need to move to GDAL 2 will not be affected. 
However, it is worth noting that GDAL is maintained by very, very, few 
volunteers (even plural is questionable here), and when they feel that 
backporting fixed from GDAL 2 to GDAL 1 is taking time from more important 
things, you will be stranded with EOL software.

So please consider taking the time to contribute to the idenfication of 
issues in the development version of rgdal built against GDAL 2 and/or 1, 
available for anonymous SVN checkout at:

svn checkout svn://scm.r-forge.r-project.org/svnroot/rgdal/trunk

Enjoy!

Roger

-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics,
Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 91 00
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no