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rgdal 1.5-8 released on CRAN

1 message · Roger Bivand

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On Sun, 31 May 2020, Simon Urbanek wrote:

            
"All the package management systems are a horrible mess" is above the 
fortune threshold IMHO.
There are several inter-twined problems here.

One is building rgdal from source on macOS using (I think from homebrew) 
mismatched versions of GDAL (<3) and PROJ (>= 6). rgdal 1.5-8 said no, 
1.5-9 says use the mismatched external software versions at your own 
responsibility (thread started here: 
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/2020-May/028131.html).

Another is one about which I tried to elicit response earlier wih no 
success, but which affects Roy: with PROJ 7, CDN download of 
transformation grids becomes possible, but organizations may well want to 
make sure that all organizational users have the same geodetic 
transformation metadata. This extends across programs, because PROJ 
underlies QGIS, pyproj, GRASS, Saga, R spatial, and so on. The CRAN macOS 
binaries, like the CRAN Windows binaries, have bundled proj and gdal 
geodetic transformation metadata, which work, but may differ by version 
from the proj and gdal geodetic transformation metadata used by other 
programs.

We need to consider a) a separate (versioned) data-only CRAN package for 
Windows and macOS packages built against PROJ and GDAL to use, shipping 
once, not in each package built against PROJ and GDAL to use as at 
present. If the users can choose which version to install, they could 
match it to organization policy. b) is to re-think source installs for 
Windows (and macOS) to use resources like the fairly well-supported 
OSGeo4W for Windows. Maybe the organization data managers don't know or 
care that different versions of geodetic transformation metadata give 
different positions, but I think ongoing changes in many national mapping 
agencies suggest that, since 1984 is not recent and tectonic movement does 
happen, the versions of the metadata will matter more going forward.

Simon, I don't think we're ready to conclude about recipies for macOS; 
certainly I am not confident about suggesting anything I cannot test on 
hardware before committing to a choice. CRAN Windows binaries now ship 
with PROJ 6.3.1 and GDAL 3.0.4, but so far we haven't seen user reaction. 
sf has been using these for some weeks, rgdal was only published built on 
these very recently. Maybe we've brought the house down and nobody has 
emerged from the rubble yet ... Let's see user response to the CRAN 
Windows binaries and consider a next move then? Again, without access to 
hardware, I'm rather stuck.

Best wishes,

Roger