[R-pkg-devel] Rcpp: how best to include source from another Github repository

[Thibault Vatter]

There is balance between DRY, safety, and customization needs. The
symlinkish approach would be "dangerous" imo, because you can't guarantee
the wrapper.cpp will stay compatible with changes in the underlying C++
library.

The submodule approach works well. Alternatives that I know of are:


   - a script that pulls the latest sources in the standalone C++ library
   and does things like adding a preprocessor macro, see e.g. rvinecopulib
   - a "patches" folder with patch files in diff format (.patch or .diff),
   see e.g. RcppEigen

Either way, such scripts or patches folders have to be excluded from being
put into the package via the .Rbuildignore.

On Wed, Jan 22, 2025, 2:33 PM John Clarke <john.clarke using cornerstonenw.com>
wrote:

> Thanks Ivan, this is helpful. I'll do some more research. It would be nice
> to have an Rcpp standard/recommended way to do this. I don't want to have a
> non-standard ./src or ./data folder structure for my Rcpp package, but
> these are the two relevant folders in my original repository. Maybe with
> some sort of synlinking I could achieve this 'custom' folder/file mapping.
> -John
>
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2025 at 1:05 PM Ivan Krylov <ikrylov using disroot.org> wrote:
>
> > В Tue, 21 Jan 2025 11:57:46 +0100
> > John Clarke <john.clarke using cornerstonenw.com> пишет:
> >
> > > Ideally, it would be nice to be able to pull the files from the
> > > source repo using a tag/hash so that the only code change in the Rcpp
> > > repo would be that reference rather than all the changes to the
> > > shared source.
> >
> > I've been using Git submodules for this purpose:
> >
> > https://codeberg.org/aitap/Ropj/src/branch/master/src
> >
> > https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules
> >
> > Every time the upstream changes I have to update the commit pointer in
> > my repository too, but other than that, it's been working fine. My
> > .Rbuildignore filters out all the unnecessary files included in the
> > upstream repository, leaving only the relevant source code in the
> > resulting source package.
> >
> > The resulting repository must be cloned with --recurse-submodules (or,
> > if forgotten, must be initialised with git submodule update --init);
> > further updates to the tracked commit pointer must be applied with git
> > submodule update. If the referenced repository becomes unavailable, it
> > will be impossible to build the package.
> >
> > --
> > Best regards,
> > Ivan
> >
>
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