[Rcpp-devel] Don't believe a word he's saying (Was: Dependence on GNU make because of $(shell))

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Samperi started to publicly accuse me on mailing lists a good year ago and I
have tried successfully not to engage for a long enough time-- as it is not
worth debating with clowns.  This however is to good to pass up, and too full
of misinformation.

On 16 November 2010 at 15:38, Dominick Samperi wrote:
| On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
| > It's been about two years since I started to maintain and extend the Rcpp
| > package which its previous maintainer had left dead and rotting in the
| > digital archives for two years already at that point.
|
| Correction here. That package that was left "dead and rotting" on CRAN
| was updated by its author (that would be me) in November of 2009 to

Precisely.  November 2009 -- I was talking about November 2008. 

So that bings "dead and rotting" to about three full years (from the last
November 2006 release of RcppTemplate til this three year hiatus was briefly
interrupted in November 2009) before the package was once again withdrawn by
Sameri, and left to rot which it has since.

Withdrawn with strong words, by the way, and in direct violations of its GPL
copyright terms.  But who cares about these such for details. Certainly not
Samperi.  [ For the record, we do in fact care about the GPL. ]

| include object-mapping features that were later reimplemented in what
| is now known as the Rcpp package. The syntax used for these features
| in Rcpp is Rcpp::as and Rcpp:wrap.

This directly implies that Romain and I read Samperi's code for implementing
our package. Let me be very plain and clear hear: We have not.

Folks are free to believe who they will: Samperi (one random package on CRAN,
no users beside himself) or us (well over a dozen packages between Romain and
myself, with fairly widespread usage by other packages).  I'll rest the
counting case here.
 
| Shortly after I released this work the following comment was added to
| the README file for Rcpp (version 0.8.3):
| 
| "As of November 2009, Dominick has re-commenced maintenance of RcppTemplate
| with new releases on CRAN.  This may provide a good opportunity to import
| some new ideas into Rcpp as well, time permitting."

That as a required update to the fact that README previosly said that
RcppTemplate was witdrawn; it actually wasn't for a few days so I wrote
something to fact that RcppTemplate was back (however briefly that turned out
to be the case). The comment refered to the fact that Samperi replaced a
rough first implementation of a data frame in C++ (still in Rcpp's classic
API as we believe in maintaining interfaces -- rather than letting them rot)
with something that looked better.  But thanks to Romain we have something
even better anyway.

As for the Make documentation hint: that's funny. Samperi was the one yelling
at Uwe for suspecting that he purposely broke his builds (please...)  It only
ever broke on Windoze anyway, and as I said -- the point is moot because of
LinkingTo.  Which Samperi's silly little cxxPack still doesn't use.

I guess Samperi is too busy flaming people and telling lies rather thank
coding. Each to their own.

Dirk

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