support for vsi7z (direct reading of compressed 7z files) in terra and sf?

Question

The current versions of terra and sf do not support direct reading of 7zip compressed files, because GDAL does not support it yet. But it seems that this feature will be included in GDAL version 3.7.0, scheduled for May 1, 2023 ( https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/milestone/42 ). Knowing that terra and sf are currently using GDAL version 3.4.1, released on 12/27/2021, should we expect that support for direct reading of 7zip files will be available in terra 's or sf 's CRAN binary packages a year or so after its inclusion in GDAL ? I have no idea how GDAL is integrated with terra or sf , so my question may be naive or poorly phrased. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It depends on your operating system, and how you install.

On Windows we depend on what is included in Rtools. Rtools tends to be up-to-date. I would expect a delay in the order of months. But as you point out it more than 12 months now. Rtools was just updated to GDAL 3.6.0 (and it should be updated again soon as that version of GDAL was retracted). There can be an additional delay if a new version of Rtools is not yet used at CRAN (or only for R-devel), so it can sometimes help to install from source.

On Linux you can install any version of GDAL you want, if you have permission to do so. The defaults on some Linux systems are terribly old. On Ubuntu it helps a lot to use the ubuntugis-unstable repository (see instructions ). If you are on Ubuntu and use r2u , then it depends on what they use.

On OSX you may use the CRAN binary or GDAL install yourself from source or install it with "brew". You can see what is used for CRAN here . I think the lag in the GDAL version of the CRAN binaries typically is also only in the order of months.