[R-SIG-Mac] sf and PROJ problem?

[Simon Urbanek]

Roy,

I think you may have misidentified the package, because sf *does* include proj.db:

$ tar fvtz big-sur-arm64/bin/4.5/sf_1.0-24.tgz | grep proj.db
-rw-rw-r--  0 root   admin  9261056 13 Jan 15:13 sf/proj/proj.db

(that's why reproducible examples are so crucial!) because the flags Brian mentioned are used for sf:

https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/QA/Simon/packages/flags.inst/sf

However, you are onto something, because it looks like due to a bug in SVN where softlinks are incorrectly resolved the other packages in flags.inst that were linking to the same (soft-linked) sf flags could not use them:
apcf
gdalcubes
gdalraster
rgdal
terra
uFTIR
vapour
vol2birdR
I'm still not too happy about the fact that they don't just simply use the db from sf and thus all require overrides and private copies, but at least I have replaced the softlinks with copies which should fix the problem (albeit they all still duplicate everything).

I think the reason that re-install from source worked for you (even though you re-installed the one package that already worked!) is that if you install *any* of the above packages (+sf) from source they will copy those files into your system location so then all of them will be able to find it. (Binary packages are not allowed to write into your system that's why we can't do it).

Cheers,
Simon


> On 14/01/2026, at 07:22, Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal via R-SIG-Mac <r-sig-mac using r-project.org> wrote:
> 
> I just updated packages on my Mac  (apple silicon,  R 4.5.2) and the package “sf” was updated.  After the update,  anything using “sf” was throwing errors that:
> 
> proj_create: Cannot find proj.db
> proj_create: no database context specified
> 
> This did not occur before the update.  When I compiled sf from source,  the problem went away.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Roy
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