[Rd] Linking to the BH package introduces CRAN warnings

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 5 November 2014 at 14:11, Romain Francois wrote:
| > Le 5 nov. 2014 à 13:43, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> a écrit :
| > You are NOT forced or required to use the Boost distributions header __as R
| > comes with the equivalent functionality__ via the Rmath.h header file from R.
| > Which has functionality that Rcpp provides to you in scalar and vector form.
| > 
| > And there are probably several dozen examples of using the R distribution
| > functions from Rcpp.
| > 
| > So this is _precisely_ what I suggested several mails ago: do your homework,
| > identify which header is causing it.  And the obvious next step is then to
| > not use the header.
| 
| So why these headers are shipped with BH then. 

The BH "builder" (ie the script local/scripts/CreateBoost.sh in the repo)
actively selects a number of Boost libraries [1], and uses the Boost tool
'bcp' to copy these (header-only) libraries -- plus all their dependencies.
The set of "selected components" grew out of initial requirements, plus
requests received since the package was created.  [2]

Now, just because some files within a library tickle a warning does not seem
to imply that all use of said warning is impossible. By my count, over two
dozen CRAN packages currently depend on BH [3] indicating some usefulness of BH,
including to the dplyr package you work on.

Policies and requirements do of cause charge, but I am not aware of any of
the two dozen package tickling this issue -- their use case is just fine,
thank you, and their requirements lead to the inclusion of the header
currently comprised in the package.

I hope this answers your question. Should you have further questions
concerning the BH package, could you be so kind as to bringing them to
appropriate list [4] or filing a ticket on GH?

Thanks, Dirk

[1] "components" may be a better term so we avoid the association with "linking"
[2] Another one of these requests just came in this week asking for circular_buffer.
[3] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/BH/index.html
[4] http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/boostheaders-devel

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