UPDATE: IsoriX 0.9.1 is on CRAN

[Alexandre Courtiol]

Hi all,

Yesterday, I submitted a new version of IsoriX on CRAN and they accepted it.

As of right now, the binary versions have already been compiled by CRAN for Windows and MacOS for the standard version of R and binaries for other versions will soon follow; so everyone should very soon be able to update IsoriX via a simple call to update.packages() in their R console.

I have NOT YET updated the online documentation accordingly. I will update the bookdown as soon as I can https://bookdown.org/content/782/ and let you know but for the moment, you can refer to the internal documentation of the package (the help pages you get when running ?some_function).

This is in some ways a major update which may introduce breaking changes (i.e. old workflow may have to be tinkered a little for things to work).

This update was mandatory because several spatial packages previously used by IsoriX (directly or indirectly) will retire sometime in October 2023 (this is ultimately the consequence of the retirement of Roger Bivand, a very influential developer in the R spatial community).

The maintainers of those packages (Bivand and colleagues) have recommended developers to rely instead on alternative packages which have been recently developed and which supersedes the old packages (i.e. terra or sf+stars, rather than raster+sp so as to avoid e.g. rgdal).

As a consequence, I had to rework a lot of code within IsoriX for it to continue to work without using the packages raster and sp.

I chose to replace raster with terra rather than with stars for several reasons (minimising changes and dependencies and betting on greater long run stability).

However, if you already know how to use sf and stars, don't be disappointed: it is easy to transform the output from IsoriX so as to use them with those alternative packages (I will show you how to in new tutorials soon).

For the most part, these changes are internal and should not impact users much, but it is possible that old workflows used to create plots will have to be adapted for the code to keep working.

I did my best not to introduce bugs or mistakes, but please keep a critical eye open since I had to tinker more or less everywhere in the code (recreate internal datasets, adapt computations to work on new objects, design my own plotting functions and methods...).

Moreover, IsoriX is not the only package that had to be overhault, other packages used by IsoriX are also being adapted, which means that the programming landscape is highly dynamic and bugs caused by incompatibility between packages are likely to surface (I fear that many developers will be forced to introduce backward incompatibilities).

I will do our best to react quickly, but please let me know as soon as something goes wrong during this hopefully short transition period that impacts the entire R spatial community.

You can let me know of any problem either here, or by dropping issues on the GitHub repository for IsoriX (https://github.com/courtiol/IsoriX/issues).

All this change can be perceived as annoying, but it is also for the best: new packages are more efficient, so performance gains are expected and it will allow us to add new features more easily in IsoriX in the future.

All changes are detailed in the NEWS file, so you can look at that for more details.

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Alexandre Courtiol, www.datazoogang.de