RProtoBuf 0.4.15: One fix, some updates, depcrecation coming

A new release 0.4.15 of RProtoBuf just arrived at CRAN. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.

This release contains a small bug fix for repeated messages and groups. While making changes, I used the opportunity to change the unit testing framework to the excellent and lightweight tinytest package permitting, among other things, tests of the installed package, and also simplified the build by using pre-made pdf vignettes. A list of changes follows below.

As one heads-up and deprecation message, we are planning to remove the (entirely unused as best as we can tell, and minimal) remote procedure call feature. Protocol Buffers itself always lacked this, but eventually gRPC arrived to fill that void. All use cases should rely on it. So we prepared a test release 0.14.15.1 corresponding to the feature/retire_minimal_rpc branch. You can install this dev release from the ghrr drat repo via one of the drat-assisted commands, or directly via install.packages("RProtoBuf", repos="https://ghrr.github.io/drat"). Please do so and test if you suspect that the change may affect you. Otherwise the removal is likely to happen in the next release (but we will strive to wait a couple of months before doing so).

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.15 (2020-02-08)

• Repeated Message and Group objects are now returned correctly (Dirk in #64 fixing #62).

• The unit tests are now run by tinytest (Dirk in #65).

• The vignettes are now included pre-made (Dirk in #67).

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

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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