what happened to sp?

hi all

Not sure if this should be asked on the grass mailing list or here.
apologies if its off-topic.

I am having a go at using R/Grass and when I try to install sp, rgdal
or maptools it complains these packages don't exist. i get the same
complaint if i try the sourceforge repo

rSpatial <- "http://r-spatial.sourceforge.net/R"
install.packages("sp", repos = rSpatial)

and as expected if i try to load spgrass6 library it complains that sp
is missing.

Whatever happed to sp? or am i doing something i shouldn't be? have
things changed over the last few months :)

thanks for any guidence

shoaib