[Rcpp-devel] Dependence on GNU make because of $(shell)

[Shane Conway]

Dominick,

My 2 cents:

Nobody gets to decide when something is dead; it's more a consensus
view driven by everyone who uses or contributes.  Looking back at the
RcppTemplate archive, I think that characterization is pretty
accurate: http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/cxxPack/Ancestry/.
 A similar look at the most recent version of Rcpp shows that it's
alive and well: http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/Rcpp/.
We should all be nothing but thankful that Dirk and Romain stepped in
and contributed so much.

You are mentioned in every Rcpp source file and in the package
documentation.  Beyond that, the old package was most definitely dead.

Shane


On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Dominick Samperi <djsamperi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 7:44 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 16 November 2010 at 23:28, Dominick Samperi wrote:
>> | I explained already how anyone who cares can do a diff and resolve
>> | this objectively.
>>
>> Please show us such a diff and put some proof into this pudding.
>>
>> Or else stop harping about a non-existing issue.  Time to "put up or shut
>> up".
>>
>> | after Nov 2009, so Rcpp today is a different animal. This thread started
>> | with your remark that my prior work, work that is the foundation for
>> | the current Rcpp package, was left "dead and rotting." The purpose
>> | of my reply was to correct this misleading remark.
>>
>> Not it wasn't. I will stand by "dead and rotting".
>>
>> Look, it's simple. RQuantLib was always a user of Rcpp, and I can assure
>> you
>> that by late 2008 your code __which had not been touched in 2 years__ no
>> longer even compiled under current g++ versions. I was using it. I believe
>> CRAN had even moved the package off the main page as it didn't build, and
>> you
>> obviously didn't care for it.  So I fixed that and started making
>> extensions;
>> see the ChangeLog for the initial changes as well as everything we all did
>> since. The per-project SVN commit counter for Rcpp is now at over 2400.
>> That's 2400 individual changesets, sometimes small and sometimes large. In
>> the space of two years.  Whereas you left RcppTemplate without single
>> character changes in three years when it didn't even build. That's what I
>> call "dead and rotting".
>>
>> And I for one do not think it is a coincidence that you come back another
>> year later bringing the rot to then _three years_ with a short-lived
>> update. And I suspect that without the ongoing Rcpp work you would never
>> have
>> done that brief camoe re-appearance of RcppTemplate.
>>
>> Anyway, "dead and rotting" it was and yes, please do provide proof for
>> your
>> allegations.
>>
>
> I have already provided proof in the form of your own words Dirk. The
> quote from Rcpp 0.8.3 that was cited earlier in this thread first appeared
> in Rcpp 0.6.7 (released Nov 8, 2009), shortly after my release of
> RcppTemplate 6.1 (release Nov 6, 2009), and before Romain joined
> the Rcpp project. Thus if anybody cares to diff, the relevant versions
> are Rcpp 0.6.7 and RcppTemplate 6.1 (the name RcppTemplate was
> chosen to limit confusion between the package name and the
> library name, BTW).
>
> I wonder how the authors of the recently released neural network package
> would feel if they saw another package author make similar remarks just
> days after the release of their hard work, followed by a wholesale
> effort to reimplement their work in another package.
>
> On Rcpp::as and Rcpp::wrap, the first is alternate syntax ("sugar")
> for a C++ SEXP constructor, and the function of Rcpp::wrap was performed
> by what I called getSEXP(). There was also some use of STL classes
> to facilitate streaming C++ to R objects. My versions were in the prototype
> phase, not as comprehensive as what was implemented later by
> Romain, but the main ideas were there in RcppTemplate.
>
> Shortly after the release of my work others joined the Rcpp team, the
> pace of development increased dramatically, and it became clear that
> to avoid wasting my time I needed to take my work in a different
> direction, so I withdrew RcppTemplate and created cxxPack.
>
> It is ironic that cxxPack is actually just the underlying plumbing for
> number of packages that I have developed over the years and was planning
> to release to CRAN, but I have been somewhat reluctant to do this
> in view of my experiences with Rcpp/cxxPack.
>
> Finally, who decides when a package is "dead and rotting"? The
> person who wants to take it over?
>
> Dominick
>
>
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