CRAN has now accepted sp version 1.2-3 (NEWS). Besides some smaller bug fixes, it comes with

  • proper plot methods for SpatialGridDataFrame objects (see this blog post), and
  • a new maps gallery showcasing better graticules, the use of web maps (google or OpenStreetMaps backdrop), as well as some ggplot-made maps and responsive mapview examples.

Checking all of the direct reverse dependencies, one of the requirements for CRAN submissions, took around half a day on a single core. It gave me

library(tools)
summary(check_packages_in_dir(".", reverse = "all"))
Check status summary:
                  ERROR WARN NOTE  OK
  Source packages     0    0    0   1
  Reverse depends     6    2   46 185
...

Five of the six Errors were due to missing second order reverse dependencies, the remaining revealed an issue with RandomFields, which had made the assumption that sp has no plot method for SpatialGridDataFrame objects; this has been resolved with its maintainer Martin Schlather.

The new sp gallery is not part of the sp package distribution (like a vignette) in order to keep sp’s dependencies to a minimum. The gallery source files are found in the gh-pages branch on github. Additions or improvements can be directly submitted as pull requests, or as issues on github.