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

Agreed 100%.  I'm blown away by the amount of work and care that you put
into helping people use these packages. I never would have completed my
dissertation without the willingness to respond thoughtfully to my
obviously "noob" questions on this forum.

-----Original Message-----
From: R-sig-Geo <r-sig-geo-bounces at r-project.org> On Behalf Of Danlin Yu
Sent: Tuesday, October 3, 2023 9:36 AM
To: r-sig-geo at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-sig-Geo] maptools, rgdal, rgeos and rgrass7 retiring
Monday, October 16

Dear Dr. Roger Bivand:

I echo this comment and sentiment.

Dr. Roger Bivand is not only a great scholar and generous contributor,
maintainer to the R-spatial task force, but also a fantastic mentor to us
all.

No amount of "thank you" would be sufficient.

Best,

Danlin

On 10/3/2023 5:22 AM, Gilberto Camara wrote:

Dear Roger

Your enormous and generous dedication to R-spatial is amazing and a

model to all of us!! Many, many thanks!

All the best
Gilberto
============================
Prof Dr Gilberto Camara
Senior Researcher
National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil
https://gilbertocamara.org/ =============================

On 3 Oct 2023, at 10:15, Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no> 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been replaced by rgrass and will be archived with the retiring packages.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

--