[R-SIG-Mac] sf installation problem under Mac OS 11 - Big Sur

[GilbertoCamara]

Dear all, 

Mac users that have upgraded to Mac OS 11 BigSur have reported having problems with “rgdal” and “sf”. The same happened to me when I upgraded my Mac.

I managed to get "sf" to run on MacOS 11.0.1 by recompiling most of the required packages. Here's the recipe:

1. Remove all spatial software from brew (if you installed it). Rgdal does not like "brewed" stuff (I believe Roger prefers wine). Seriously, it appears that rgdal looks for libraries in their default places and not in the "Cellar" libraries used by "brew".

2. Install Xcode 12.3beta (downloaded from Apple Developers). This is the latest version of XCode which is compatible with MacOS BigSur.

3. Install "wget" using brew:

"brew install wget".

4. Download the libraries below from their sources:

(a) sqlite-autoconf-3330000.tar.gz from "https://www.sqlite.org/download.html <https://www.sqlite.org/download.html>".
(b) tiff-4.1.0.tar.gz from "https://download.osgeo.org/libtiff/ <https://download.osgeo.org/libtiff/>"
(c) proj-7.2.0.tar.gz from "https://proj.org/download.html#current-release <https://proj.org/download.html#current-release>"
(d) libgeotiff-1.6.0.tar.gz from "https://download.osgeo.org/geotiff/libgeotiff/ <https://download.osgeo.org/geotiff/libgeotiff/>"
(e) geos-3.8.1.tar.bz2 from "https://trac.osgeo.org/geos <https://trac.osgeo.org/geos>"
(f) gdal-3.2.0.tar.gz from "https://gdal.org/download.html <https://gdal.org/download.html>"

5. In the order given above, unpack each library and then execute the following commands:
% ./configure
% make
% sudo make install

6. Now you are ready to compile "rgdal" and "sf" from source. Using the R console,do:

> install.packages("rgdal", type = "source”)
> install.packages("sf", type = "source")
	
7. After those steps, both "rgdal" and "sf" are working on MacOS BigSur.

Hope this helps Mac users.

Best 
Gilberto
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