use recent GDAL version

[achubaty]

Ubuntu checks requiring rgdal and related packages fail because an older GDAL version is being installed:

#> checking GDAL version >= 1.11.4... no
#> configure: error: upgrade GDAL to 1.11.4 or later
#> ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘rgdal’

Ideally, GDAL >= 2 would be installed from the ubuntugis repo, e.g., using the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgdal-dev

[ateucher]

This would be great... I have several packages depending on sf, which seems to be unable to install because of this. I would be happy to try a PR, but I don't see a way of adding an additional apt repository in https://github.com/r-hub/sysreqsdb/blob/master/sysreqs/libgdal.json.

[pat-s]

Isn't gdal meanwhile at v2 in 18.04+? Even Travis supports 18.04 when setting dist: bionic.

[achubaty]

@pat-s just to followup: bionic doesn't work for travis. it will still use xenial:

Without going into too much detail, I will say that there is currently no Bionic image capable of building languages other than Perl, Python and Ruby. (These are arbitrary choices, and we will work on expanding the list.)

https://travis-ci.community/t/bionic-builds-fail-call-xenial-solved/4899/3 (not actually solved).

[pat-s]

Bionic and Focal are now officially supported.

[achubaty]

While I can get jobs to run using bionic, they fail when trying to install R:

curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 403 
The command "eval curl -fLo /tmp/R-4.0.0-$(lsb_release -cs).xz https://travis-ci.rstudio.org/R-4.0.0-$(lsb_release -cs).xz " failed 3 times.

Looks like Rstudio does not provide bionic nor focal versions, so these are de facto unsupported still.