On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 12:29 PM, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck@gmail.com
> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Claudia Beleites <cbeleites@units.it>
> wrote:
> > On 12/02/2010 10:32 AM, Liviu Andronic wrote:
> >>
> >> Dear all
> >>
> >> On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 7:21 PM, Dominick Samperi<djsamperi@gmail.com>
> >>  wrote:
> >>>
> >>> The author line of the latest release of the R package
> >>> Rcpp (0.8.9) was revised as follows:
> >>>
> >>> From: "based on code written during 2005 and 2006 by Dominick Samperi"
> >>>
> >>> To: "a small portion of the code is based on code written during 2005
> and
> >>> 2006 by Dominick Samperi"
> >>>
> >>> From the info given in the thread, personally I'm sympathetic to
> >>
> >> Dominick's complaint: the latter message is no proper way to
> >> acknowledge the original author of the package. As I see it, the
> >> project either:
> >> - explicitly mentions the original author and the active (current)
> >> contributors (and perhaps previous ones), or
> >> - lines up all previous contributors in a line and singles out the
> >> active contributors
> >
> > - or in this case say that it was forked (when) from (Author)'s (package)
> > (version)
>
> I think the danger in all this is that future developers might see
> this discussion and then conclude that they would be better off
> redeveloping existing packages encouraging a wasteful Not Invented
> Here attitude rather than stand on the shoulders of others. That would
> divert resources into nonproductive duplicative activities and slow
> the growth of R.
>
> Perhaps the takeaway is (1) to be particularly careful about forking a
> project and (2) also for package developers to try as hard as they can
> to write their packages in a such a way that they can be added onto
> externally rather than requiring modification of the package itself.
> For example, DBI allows external database drivers and Rcmdr allows
> external plugins.  zoo can accommodate new classes of index without
> modifying zoo itself.  And of course R itself has specific facilities
> for encouraging user contributed packages which do not require any
> change at all to R itself.
>
> In fact, I wonder if its still not too late for the package in
> question.  Perhaps it would be possible to divide it into two packages
> -- one would be the new code and the other would be the original base
> package with just sufficient modifications to allow the new package to
> consist of add-ons to it.  (I haven't actually used the package in
> question so I am not sure if this is realistic but thought I would
> throw it out as a potential resolution.)
>

Actually, I attempted the reverse and created cxxPack (previosly
known as RcppTemplate, and Rcpp before that), a package that
depends on Rcpp (current version), and is designed to provide
a kind of C++ application level interface on top of the lower-level
interface provided by Rcpp, with particular focus on financial
applications.

For example, there is a C++ class ZooSeries that represents a
zoo time series, and a C++ class DataFrame that represents
an R data frame. These classes have C++ SEXP constructors,
and the resulting object has no linkage to a corresponding object
on the R side. In contrast, Rcpp tends to provide C++ classes
that are wrappers for R objects. Objects of type ZooSeries
and DataFrame can be mapped to the corresponding R
objects and passed back to R, for example.

Designing C++ classes that embed the logic of
corresponding R objects is more difficult than just wrapping
the corresponding R object, and I'm not sure this will
pay dividends, but it is there nevertheless. There
appears to be zero interest from the R community.

It turns out that Rcpp (in its various incarnations) was always
just a tool that I have used to build scientific applications,
and it is unfortunate that issues related to this tool have
overshadowed the real work. I surely do not want to
waste my time merging cxxPack/Rcpp into yet another
R/C++ solution, and I hope that the outcome of this
discussion does not lead to this.

Thanks,
Dominick



>
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