Following the question put on this list at: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/2016-October/025038.html about the default for reading 64-bit integers using rgdal::readOGR(), a possibly breaking change has been made. The doodle vote came down very strongly in favour of changing the previous "allow.loss" default to "no.loss", nobody supported keeping "allow.loss". Previously, if the int64 fitted into a signed int32, things worked, but broke silently if values overflowed for GDAL >= 2 (GDAL < 2 did not have 64-bit integers). Now the default is to treat all 64-bit integers as strings - think of US Census block numbers. Users will see consequences from this if the expectation in scripts was an integer value (ASDAR code has been updated on the book website). See the function help page and examples for more details. When in doubt, use ogrInfo() to check field types before reading. For some, the GDAL1_integer64_policy argument may be helpful; it is set to FALSE by default, but if TRUE will do what GDAL < 2 did, and return numeric (floating point) values when integers were specified in a field too wide for 32-bit integers (typically in Shapefiles where most of the misery - as always - occurs). If many users feel it necessary, I can add a once-per-session option to set this argument. In addition, rgdal::readOGR() will no longer throw an error if the layer argument is missing, but will ask the data source name (dsn) argument for a list of layers. If only one is found, it will be used silently, if more than one, the first will be used and a warning given. This should correspond to sf::st_read(). Functions opening raster files may pass open options when linked to GDAL
= 2; very few drivers accept such options, but as GDAL 2 provides this
possibility, it is now provided. Hope this makes sense, Roger
Roger Bivand Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 91 00 e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2392-6140 https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=AWeghB0AAAAJ&hl=en http://depsy.org/person/434412