A new release 0.4.13 of RProtoBuf got onto CRAN a few hours ago. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed fairly widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.

It would also appear that I failed to blog about release 0.4.12 from July. Both releases contain a number of very nice and focused contributed pull requests – see below for more – as well as some standard packaging maintenance.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.13 (2018-11-03)

• The configure setup is more robust with respect to the C++ setup (CRAN request).

• POSIXlt elements are now properly serialized too (Jeffrey Shen in #48 and #50 fixing #47)

• Added two Dockerfiles for continuous integration and use; see this url for more.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.12 (2018-07-11)

• Recursive serialization of sublists returning themselves is now recognised (Jeffrey Shen in #38 fixing #37)

• New function readProtoFiles2 to be consistent with protoc (Siddhartha Bagaria in #40 fixing #39)

• Update Windows binary library used (Maciej Lach and Jeroen Ooms in #42 and follow-up commits)

• New unit tests for new functionality (Siddhartha Bagaria in #45)

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the ‘quick’ overview vignette, a unit test summary vignette, and the pre-print for the JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.