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

8 messages · Gilberto Camara, Danlin Yu, Sean Trende +3 more

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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packages maptools, rgdal and rgeos will be archived by CRAN on Monday, October 16, 2023; rgrass7 has  already been replaced by rgrass and will be archived with the retiring packages.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
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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/
=============================
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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/
=============================
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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:

  
    
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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:
--
___________________________________________
Danlin Yu, Ph.D.
Professor of GIS and Urban Geography
Department of Earth & Environmental Studies Montclair State University Montclair, NJ, 07043
Tel: 973-655-4313
Fax: 973-655-4072
Office: CELS 314
Email: yud at montclair.edu
webpage: csam.montclair.edu/~yu
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I also echo all this comments.

Very grateful for Roger Bivand effort.

Manuel

On Tue, 3 Oct 2023 at 07:41 Sean Trende via R-sig-Geo <
r-sig-geo at r-project.org> wrote:

            

  
  
12 days later
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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:

            

  
    
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Congratulations and thank you so much for your hard work here!
On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 4:53?AM Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no> wrote: