[GRASS-stats] Maintainer for rgrass needed by end 2024

[Roger Bivand]

In connection with the transfer of the grass-dev list to Discourse, which I am not prepared to follow as it will absorb much more time than scanning the digested list headers, I will give up maintaining the R-GRASS interface package at the end of 2024. 

The package lives in https://github.com/rsbivand/rgrass and the repo can be moved to the preferred location of the new maintainer, and the maintainer change notified to CRAN without difficulty. 

The arrival of Discourse precipitates a change that was started before a workshop at FOSS4G in 2022 https://rsbivand.github.io/foss4g_2022/modernizing_220822.html, and several GRASS users/developers then contributed to the workshop, and have helped improve the package over many years.

Before a hand-over, this group of contributors can go through issues not yet formally closed but mostly settled, to make sure that the new maintainer ramps up smoothly. 

Best wishes,

Roger

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