CRAN releases of sp, rgdal and rgeos
There are new releases of sp, rgdal and rgeos on CRAN. Please install sp first, then the other two, which link to the installed sp. They all address so-called rchk issues, which have not so far been a problem, but might have become more fragile as R's internal memory management is made even more efficient. This involves compiled code using memory allocated by R to be freed by R's garbage collector, which has to know if an object is still being used. Tomas Kalibera, the author of rchk, helped resolve and explain the issues encountered - what was good coding practice fifteen years ago isn't always still good practice. In addition, the earliest versions of GDAL and PROJ with which rgdal will work have been updated, and set to PROJ 4.8.0 and GDAL 1.11.4. The current released versions of PROJ and GDAL are to be prefered, as bugs have been fixed and new features and drivers introduced. A check has been put in place to trap attempts to install rgdal without a C++11-capable compiler when the GDAL version is >=2.3.0 - which requires C++11. rgeos is ready for the forthcoming version of GEOS. The CRAN team has also been very supportive of our efforts to bring compiled code in these packages into rchk compliance. Please get in touch if you see any loose ends in these releases. Roger
Roger Bivand Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2392-6140 https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=AWeghB0AAAAJ&hl=en