[R-sig-Geo] CRAN releases of sp, rgdal and rgeos

[Roger Bivand]

There are new releases of sp, rgdal and rgeos on CRAN. Please install sp 
first, then the other two, which link to the installed sp. They all 
address so-called rchk issues, which have not so far been a problem, but 
might have become more fragile as R's internal memory management is made 
even more efficient. This involves compiled code using memory allocated by 
R to be freed by R's garbage collector, which has to know if an object is 
still being used. Tomas Kalibera, the author of rchk, helped resolve and 
explain the issues encountered - what was good coding practice fifteen 
years ago isn't always still good practice.

In addition, the earliest versions of GDAL and PROJ with which rgdal will 
work have been updated, and set to PROJ 4.8.0 and GDAL 1.11.4. The current 
released versions of PROJ and GDAL are to be prefered, as bugs have been 
fixed and new features and drivers introduced. A check has been put 
in place to trap attempts to install rgdal without a C++11-capable 
compiler when the GDAL version is >=2.3.0 - which requires C++11. rgeos is 
ready for the forthcoming version of GEOS.

The CRAN team has also been very supportive of our efforts to bring 
compiled code in these packages into rchk compliance.

Please get in touch if you see any loose ends in these releases.

Roger

-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics,
Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
voice: +47 55 95 93 55; e-mail: Roger.Bivand using nhh.no
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2392-6140
https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=AWeghB0AAAAJ&hl=en