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

Romain Francois romain at r-enthusiasts.com
Wed Nov 17 16:41:31 CET 2010


Le 17/11/10 16:09, Dominick Samperi a écrit :
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Shane Conway <shane.conway at gmail.com
> <mailto:shane.conway at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     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.
>
>
> All citations have date ranges: 2005-2006 (the "Rcpp Classic" era), and
> that
> is quite different from Nov 2009 (see previous discussion). The work
> that you are so
> grateful for occurred *after* Nov 2009, not before.
>
> I am also grateful for this work, Romain is obviously a talented programmer,
> and the support provided by Romain and Dirk is a valuable service, as I
> have said before.

We cannot say the same about your service, unless we use a sarcasm scale.

> I wish I did not have to maintain cxxPack, much of it should be part
> of Rcpp,

no way. get lost.

> but working cooperatively on this seems to be out of the
> question.

We are very open for collaboration. Rcpp has now 4 developers, who have 
various interest. We are always listening to the mailing list and often 
implement things in response to a question on the maing list (for 
example sugar was community-trigerred, another example is code I 
commited today).

We however have no (even remote) interest in collaborating with you or 
anyone who would be that repeatedly annoying. Developping Rcpp is a lot 
of work, it is also a lot of fun. Dealing with you is just a plain 
source of pain.

>     Shane
>
>
>     On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Dominick Samperi
>     <djsamperi at gmail.com <mailto:djsamperi at gmail.com>> wrote:
>      >
>      >
>      > On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 7:44 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel
>     <edd at debian.org <mailto: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
>      >
>      >
>      > _______________________________________________
>      > Rcpp-devel mailing list
>      > Rcpp-devel at lists.r-forge.r-project.org
>     <mailto:Rcpp-devel at lists.r-forge.r-project.org>
>      >
>     https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rcpp-devel


-- 
Romain Francois
Professional R Enthusiast
+33(0) 6 28 91 30 30
http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr
|- http://bit.ly/9VOd3l : ZAT! 2010
|- http://bit.ly/c6DzuX : Impressionnism with R
`- http://bit.ly/czHPM7 : Rcpp Google tech talk on youtube




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