Until June 2023, maintainers of legacy packages using rgdal, rgeos and/or maptools were encouraged to migrate to sf/stars or terra, as described in https://github.com/r-spatial/evolution and blogs listed there: 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. In June 2023, sp switches from using rgdal by default for sp::CRS and sp::spTransform to using sf functionality by default. From October 2023, retiring packages rgdal, rgeos and maptools will be archived on CRAN. This means that residual installations of retiring packages will continue for R 4.2 and R 4.3, but will not be updated after October 2023, nor will they be available for R 4.4. The workshop presented current status, and may have assisted participants with affected workflows to adapt; the same applied to key affected packages needed in participants' workflows. Participants were invited to contact the presenter with practical ideas to packages to adapt, and time may also have been used to prepare non-maintainer update candidates for non-responsive packages. The count of affected packages was over 800, but the severity of the impact of the withdrawal of the retiring packages varies by the dependency category, strong dependence as Depends or Imports, weak dependence as Suggests. |