[R-sig-Geo] maptools, rgdal, rgeos and rgrass7 retiring Monday, October 16

[Roger Bivand]

As previously announced, maptools, rgdal, rgeos and rgrass7 have been 
archived by CRAN at my request. Some turbulence may be expected as about 
80 packages with remaining strong dependencies on the archived packages 
also are archived. I'm very grateful to many maintainers who have 
responded to requests to update in time.

Going forward, sp 2.1-1 will be submitted shortly removing on-load 
messages, and about 70 non-updated packages with remaining weak 
dependencies on the archived packages will be warned to update.

Any issues arising from the evolution process should be reported here or 
at https://github.com/r-spatial/evolution/issues.

Roger

On Tue, 3 Oct 2023, Roger Bivand wrote:

> The legacy R spatial infrastructure packages maptools, rgdal and rgeos 
> will be archived by CRAN on Monday, October 16, 2023; rgrass7 has 
> already been replaced by rgrass and will be archived with the retiring 
> packages.
>
> The choice of date matches the previously announced archiving during 
> October 2023, and the specific date matches the release schedule of 
> Bioconductor 3.18 (some Bioconductor packages depend on retiring 
> packages).
>
> sp_2.1-0 was published October 2, 2023, dropping all dependencies on the 
> retiring packages. sp will continue to be available and maintained, but 
> not developed further. Users of sp classes may continue to make use of 
> them, but will have to use sf or terra to read, write or manipulate 
> objects with coercion (for a guide to coercion, see 
> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rgrass/vignettes/coerce.html).
>
> Information about the evolution project may be found in reports and 
> resources at 
> https://r-spatial.github.io/evolution/; 
> a recent blog by Jakub Nowosad may also be useful as an overview of what 
> has been going on: 
> https://geocompx.org/post/2023/rgdal-retirement/. 
> For more detail, see 
> https://r-spatial.github.io/evolution/ogh23_bivand.html 
> and a video recording of this presentation 
> https://av.tib.eu/media/63141 
> (August 28).
>
> All directly affected package maintainers have been alerted to the 
> impending changes, some in December 2022, most others in March-April 
> 2023. Many have already updated their packages on CRAN - thank you for 
> your understanding! The remainder received github issue comments and 
> email reminders in the last ten days, and will receive final notices to 
> update by October 9.
>
> On R-universe, builds of packages archived on CRAN are dropped 
> automatically 
> (https://github.com/r-universe-org/help/issues/286). 
> Read-only github mirrors of archived packages will remain available in 
> principle while github exists 
> (https://github.com/r-hub/rhub/issues/568), 
> for example 
> https://github.com/cran/rgdal. 
> Other binary builds (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu) have been alerted; support 
> at Anaconda has been alerted.
>
> On CRAN, the retired packages will continue to be available as source 
> packages on 
> https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive. 
> maptools, rgdal and rgeos also retain their R-forge repositories, which 
> may be used to retrieve functions for adding to other packages.
>
> A snapshot of Windows and macOS binary packages may be found on 
> https://github.com/r-spatial/evolution/tree/main/backstore.
>
> Please raise questions by replying to this post, or as issues on 
> https://github.com/r-spatial/evolution.
>
>
> --
> Roger Bivand
> Emeritus Professor
> Norwegian School of Economics
> Postboks 3490 Ytre Sandviken, 5045 Bergen, Norway
> Roger.Bivand using nhh.no
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> R-sig-Geo using r-project.org
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>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Emeritus Professor
Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics,
Postboks 3490 Ytre Sandviken, 5045 Bergen, Norway.
e-mail: Roger.Bivand using nhh.no