dependency on retiring spatial infrastructure packages

[rsbivand]

You will be aware, for example from:
https://r-spatial.org/r/2022/04/12/evolution.html,
https://r-spatial.org/r/2022/12/14/evolution2.html,
https://r-spatial.org/r/2023/04/10/evolution3.html and
https://rsbivand.github.io/csds_jan23/bivand_csds_ssg_230117.pdf and
perhaps view https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlpjIqTPMCA&list=PLzREt6r1NenmWEidssmLm-VO_YmAh4pq9&index=1
that rgdal, rgeos and maptools will be retired this
year, in October 2023.

rdhs imports 'rgdal' using rgdal::readOGR as found by pkgapi, not in NAMESPACE, in R/read_datasets.R and R/shapes.R. sf is already suggested, so using as(sf::st_read(), "Spatial") is a feasible mitigation. Please fix best before June, latest October 2023.

[OJWatson]

Hi @rsbivand - thank you for the heads up. We will make the changes in May as part of our next release.

Sorry for the delay in responding to these changes.

[rsbivand]

Excellent, thanks!

[rsbivand]

@OJWatson Did your release get delayed? Less than three months remain now.

[rsbivand]

@OJWatson @karthik @jeroen Less than three weeks remain to fix this.

[rsbivand]

@OJWatson @karthik @jeroen R spatial infrastructure packages maptools, rgdal and rgeos will be archived by CRAN on Monday, October 16, 2023. Your package does not pass CMD check when these packages are not available. Expect your package to be archived by CRAN October 17-18 as CRAN checks feed through and your package fails, if not updated by Monday, October 16, 2023.

No grace period is anticipated, as you have had sufficient time to update your package to remove dependencies on maptools, rgdal and/or rgeos.

[jeroen]

Thanks for the heads up @rsbivand. We will have to retire the package if it is not fixed in time.

[OJWatson]

@jeroen @rsbivand

I am on it and I am working towards the deadlines you noted for CRAN removal. Thank you for the reminder and will be pushed in time before these are removed from CRAN

[rsbivand]

@OJWatson Thanks. Please let me know if I can help check a submission candidate tarball. Which branch of the repo will you be using?

[OJWatson]

Hi @rsbivand, thank you for the offer. It should be fine as i'll test the changes using Github Actions (from this PR #147) - this does a more thorough test than what CRAN does but once that is passing, I'll check it on rhub etc before submitting to CRAN.

[rsbivand]

@OJWatson you need to be sure that GA does not put retiring packages on the library path directly or indirectly. I certainly prefer to be closer to the metal than GA enables. And ensure that roxygen doesn't smuggle any declrations back, ask may easily happen and is hard to correct.

[OJWatson]

Hi @rsbivand, v0.8.0 (https://github.com/ropensci/rdhs/releases/tag/v0.8.0) has just made its way to CRAN (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rdhs/index.html), which removes the spatial dependencies.

Let me know if you have any comments and apologies for the delay with respect to the original development timelines I suggested.