[Rcpp-devel] Integrating C-library libmseed to R

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 12 July 2016 at 19:33, Leo Leo wrote:
| Dear Rcpp_devel enthusiats,
| 
| May I ask you for exploiting your potential? I am working on a package to
| handle seismic data (https://github.com/coffeemuggler/eseis).
| 
| A key task is to be able to read and write the so called miniseed format. There
| is a C-library for this job (https://seiscode.iris.washington.edu/projects/
| libmseed/files).
| 
| What would be needed to implement this library to my package? The goal would be
| to have functions like read_mseed(file, ...) and write_mseed(data, file, ...).
| According to the library documentation the functions that do this are
| ms_readmsr(3) and ms_readtraces(3) as well as mst_pack(3) and mst_writemseed
| (3).

The very simplest option is probably to just copy the content of the library
itself -- ie the *.c (or *.cpp) and *h files -- to your package's src/
directory.  That way the content is present and can be used by your add-on
functions.

A slightly better and more involved option is to keep it in a subdirectory
and have it built, say during configure.  You package then points to that
(static) library from its src/Makevars.

There are other options. But all this somehow requires you to know a little
bit about library building, which then becomes OS-dependent as this is
different between Linux and OS X, not to mention Windows.

| As usual, the question is rather simple but I have no idea if the answer can
| also be that simple. I would greatly appreciate your help and be delighted if
| you could help me with this major step.

I fear there is no super-simple answer.

Dirk

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