[Rprotobuf-yada] strategy for releasing (e.g. what to do about windows)

[Romain François]

Hi,

I'm getting quite happy about the package now.

I plan to integrate Saptarshi's proto file and implement some setAs 
methods so that we can represent "any" R data as a message, which should 
be nice.

But I'd like to release before that, so that people can start to play 
with it, ...

I'm quite uncertain about what to do to release the package so that it 
works on windows. I'm sure windows people would expect to only have to 
install the package, so should be distribute a compiled libproto ?

Another thing I'm not sure about is these lines in rprotobuf.cpp :

	MockErrorCollector error_collector ;
	DiskSourceTree source_tree;
	// FIXME : this works only on linux I suppose
	source_tree.MapPath("/", "/");
	Importer importer(&source_tree, &error_collector);

which for obvious reasons won't work on windows. This is quite central 
to the package because if we can't read proto files, we can't do anything.


BTW, I was just comparing the byte size of R serialization with the byte 
size of protobuf's, and it is quite striking:

 > message <- new( tutorial.Person, name = "dddd", email = "eeeeeee", id 
= 1 )
 > length( serialize( message, NULL ) )
[1] 17
 > length( serialize( as.list(message), NULL ) )
[1] 166

Now I understand what Saptarshi meant with R serialization being verbose.

Romain

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Romain Francois
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