[Rcpp-devel] Planning to remove the MSVC patch

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 30 August 2010 at 07:25, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| 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.  

As nobody came forward with a well-reasoned argument as to may we should have
a patch that enables a compiler nobody can use, I have now removed it.

For what it is worth, the contributed files remain in the SVN repo in a new
subdirectory   deprecated/msvc/   Those who care deeply enough can alwaus
patch source locally. The affected SVN revisions are 2065 to 2067.

Cheers, Dirk

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