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

[Roger Bivand]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2018, MacQueen, Don wrote:

> Success!
>
> This morning I upgraded a Mac to OS 10.13.5 (the so-called High Sierra 
> version), then
>
> - Installed R 3.5.0 from CRAN (installed ever 3.3.x)
> - Installed sp 1.3-1, rgdal 1.3-2, rgeos 0.3-28, also sf 0.6-3, from the
>   CRAN binaries that are now available
> - Ran my personal test suite, which exercises the kinds of tasks I
>   perform with those packages
>
> All tests succeeded.

Thanks for reporting - especially on your own test suite. We do what we 
can to cover typical use cases, but independent testing in production 
settings is reassuring for everybody. We're expecting more PROJ-based 
changes later this year and next year, so it is great to have external 
test sets to be able to check where any changes in output are coming from.

This is an encouragement to other users whose production depends on R 
packages using GDAL, PROJ and/or GEOS to follow this example and keep a 
script handy to test your use cases, and a history of output files with 
which to compare (diff). We don't worry about changes in the EPSG 
versions, but by next year they may be properly anchored too (changes in 
PROJ may include reference system definitions with timestamps).

>
> I forgot to control the order of installation, so I don't know if I 
> installed sp first, as advised. But I expect that with the binary 
> versions it doesn't matter.

Right, the binary builds use the sp version on the build platform.

Best wishes,

Roger

>
> (I don't think it matters for the above, but I also installed the clang 
> and gfortran version provided on CRAN's Mac "tools" page, and 
> successfully compiled some source packages that require fortran, and 
> others that require C).
>
> Thank again for all your work
> -Don
>
> --
> Don MacQueen
> Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
> 7000 East Ave., L-627
> Livermore, CA 94550
> 925-423-1062
> Lab cell 925-724-7509
>
>
>
> On 6/8/18, 11:15 AM, "R-sig-Geo on behalf of Roger Bivand" <r-sig-geo-bounces using r-project.org on behalf of Roger.Bivand using nhh.no> wrote:
>
>    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
>
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>
>

-- 
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