On 04/21/2013 08:31 PM, Roger Bivand wrote:
> You could ask there what resources they would need to offer less 
> antiquated packages for stable, which is your specific problem - 
> testing and unstable are not up to date, but are not bad. The only 
> practical solution is for Debian GIS to provide newer binary versions 
> of GDAL and GEOS for Debian stable.
If I understand Debian's release process [1] correctly, "stable" is 
essentially what "testing" was two years ago, and not updated anymore 
except for security bugs. So, unless I'm wrong on that point, the 
"stable" packages are not going to be updated until the next major 
release of Debian. "Debian GIS" doesn't provide packages for six years 
now, and neither libgdal nor libgeos are available as backports [2] -- 
new packages compiled using the "stable" toolchain. I cannot install 
from "testing" because this requires an update of libc -- a bad thing to 
do in a production environment, I have been told. And I'm not going to 
install from source, because this could mean that, in the end, I'll have 
to reinstall everything that depends on those libs from source.

While I understand that people write to you first when they see a bug in 
rgeos/rgdal, I don't think that you can be held responsible for bugs in 
the libs that those R packages wrap. If you insist on forcing people to 
use only the most recent libgeos/libgdal, the ./configure script should 
reflect this. Otherwise I find the dependency to 3.2.2 rather arbitrary.

It's a difficult situation. I can ask the backports people if they can 
also offer libgdal/libgeos plus whatever dependencies these packages 
have (PROJ.4, ...). And of course there's always the way of 
"jailbreaking" rgdal/rgeos by messing with its ./configure script -- 
implying loss of warranty :-)


-Kirill


[1] http://www.debian.org/releases/
[2] http://backports.debian.org/

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

