maptools, rgdal, rgeos and rgrass7 retiring Monday, October 16

As previously announced, maptools, rgdal, rgeos and rgrass7 have been
archived by CRAN at my request.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already been replaced by rgrass and will be archived with the retiring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 at nhh.no

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