PDQ 7.0 Dev is Underway

The primary goal for this release is to make PDQ acceptable for uploading to CRAN. This is a non-trivial exercise because there is some legacy C code in the PDQ library that needs to be reorganized while, at the same time, keeping it consistent for programmatically porting to other languages besides R—chiefly Perl (for the book) and Python.

To get there, the following steps have been identified:

1. High Priority

   1. Migrate from SourceForge to GitHub.
   2. Change the return type for these functions from int to void:
      • PDQ_CreateOpen()
      • PDQ_CreateClosed()
      • PDQ_CreateNode()
      • PDQ_CreateMultiNode()
      Using the returned int as a counter was deprecated in version 6.1.1.
   3. Convert PDQ-R to Rcpp interface.
   4. Clean out the Examples directory and other contributed code directories leaving only Examples that actually use the PDQ C library.
   5. Add unit tests for PDQ C library, as well as the Perl, Python, and R languages.
   6. Get interface accepted on CRAN
   7. Add the ability to solve multi-server queueing nodes servicing an arbitrary number of workloads.

2. Low Priority

   1. Get interface accepted on CPAN and PyPI.
   2. Convert to build system from makefiles to Cmake.

Stay tuned!

—njg and pjp