How to clone geospatial to choose versions of external software?

[rsbivand]

@edzer and @HenrikBengtsson (r-spatial/sf#1899 (comment)) : Since Solaris is no longer available for testing on CRAN (it was stuck at GDAL: 2.2.4, PROJ: 5.2.0, GEOS: 3.7.3), we need to add a GHA to check sf (and terra, vapour, "gdalcubes", etc.) HEAD to see that installation still succeeds for the versions of external software on CentOS 7.9 and Ubuntu 18.04, which were trapped before by CRAN/Solaris.

I've been rebuilding and installing GDAL: 2.2.4, PROJ: 5.2.0, GEOS: 3.7.3 on my fully updated Fedora 35, so I don't think that there is a problem with the older PROJ/GDAL/GEOS versions needing older versions of their upstream dependencies; my checks were all run with current R.

Which choices should we look at to be able just to see that say R CMD SHLIB completes successfully (not INSTALL to avoid installing packages sf depends on) after having run ./configure?

[cboettig]

@rsbivand thanks for reaching out. Others here may have more expertise on some of the nuances, but re: the headline question of different versions for rocker/geospatial:

• The vanilla rocker/geospatial installs from the ubuntu:focal apt repos alone. I believe this should ensure comparability with binaries from focal-based RSPM builds and a good degree of stability, but obviously leaves your GDAL/PROJ/GEOS frozen.
• rocker/geospatial:ubuntugis pins the ubuntugis PPA, see the build script. This build script is available on all rocker-versioned2 images, and by altering the env var as you see you can upgrade to a different branch of that PPA (e.g. unstable).
• rocker/geospatial:dev-osgeo builds these from source. The recipes there are based on the official OSGEO dockerfiles, and you again should be able to customize versions of PROJ/GDA/GEOS by setting the corresponding *_VERSION env vars before running that script, though iirc not all versions succeed.

HTH and apologies if that's not what you were asking about

[rsbivand]

Thanks; I'll wait for other participants to respond @edzer @HenrikBengtsson; I think that standard ubuntu:bionic would work (PROJ 4.9.3,GDAL 2.2.3, GEOS 3.6.2), or ubuntugis:bionic (PROJ 5.2.0, GDAL 2.4.2, GEOS 3.7.1). I note that there were issues with lwgeom on (some version of sources) on bionic, but all we need to do is to check that the C/C++ code compiles, we don't need to run CMD check. Since I have never used Debian/Ubuntu, the packaging isn't something I grasp intuitively, sorry.