[Rcpp-devel] Planning to remove the MSVC patch

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Having discussed this some more with Romain who has no strong views on the
matter, I am inclined to the remove the patch that added the ability for
compilation with MSVC as I cannnot come up with answers to these questions:

  i)   Why would it make sense to have this? Honestly, what is it good for to
       compile Rcpp _in isolation_ when one cannot load the resulting object
       code in R ?
 
  ii)  The new files lack proper headers, credits, copyrights.  Our code plays
       by the rules in terms of credits, copyrights and licensing. I see no
       reason to lower our standards and risk getting into trouble when as
       per i) there is no reason or upside anyway.
 
  iii) I fear it attracts the wrong crowd of Windows users with little
       knowledge about R, and little C/C++ understanding outside their
       cherished IDE.  If people want something for Visual Whatever, I just
       learned from Bryan Lewis the other day that he is working on an
       Rserve-on-Windows improvement -- see http://illposed.net/rserve.html
       and in particular the last paragraph. That is a better route as it may
       actually work with dotWhatever etc.

But before I remove the patch I would like to hear from potential users
(ideally: others than just the patch submitters) as to why this would be a
bad idea.  

Thanks, Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com