R help - Oct 2023 - maptools, rgdal, rgeos and rgrass7 retiring Monday, October 16

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archived by CRAN on Monday, October 16, 2023; rgrass7 has  already been replaced
by rgrass and will be archived with the retiring packages.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