[gdal-dev] Abou R sf library and GDAL

[Roger Bivand]

Further to the previous reply (copied below), Windows x86_64  sf, terra and other packages built with GDAL have GDAL 3.8.3. The 3.9 series has been a bit jumpy, but hopefully has now found the worst regressions, so we can try proposing 3.9.3, but initally only for drivers not requiring additional external libraries. Thw main Windows binary development effort is on arm64, so adding extra external libraries needs to be very well justified. I don't recall whether your driver, Abel, needs such libraries.

It is seen as vital that the build train used for building upstream software to be linked to R itself is built with the same build train for binary packages distributed by CRAN, which cannot answer queries about random failures caused by mixing build trains. 

For macOS (I checked on arm64), released sf has GDAL 3.5.3, so could be worth pursuing say with 3.9.3 anyway.

Roger

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The key distinction is between installation on systems for which CRAN builds static packages - Windows and macOS - and others installed from  the sf source, and dynamically linking to the system-provided GDAL version.

In the latter case, the user may choose to install GDAL from source instead. In the former case, the sf.and terra developers can ask for an update.

For Windows, MXE is used to cross-compile GDAL and its upstream dependencies, so more steps are needed. I'll check the current Windows and macOS GDAL versions and report back.

Roger

PS. Rstudio is an IDE, always do real work just using R itself. Also, VScode is another IDE.


--
Roger Bivand
Emeritus Professor
Norwegian School of Economics
Postboks 3490 Ytre Sandviken, 5045 Bergen, Norway
Roger.Bivand at nhh.no