The BH package provides a sizeable portion of the Boost C++ libraries as a set of template headers for use by R. It is quite popular, and frequently used together with Rcpp. The BH CRAN page shows e.g. that it is used by rstan, dplyr as well as a few other packages. The current count of reverse dependencies is at 164.

Boost releases every four months. The last release we packaged was 1.66 from February—and this BH release gets us to Boost 1.69 released just three or so weeks ago. And as blogged last month, we made a pre-release (following several reverse-depends checks) to allow three packages affected by changes in Boost to adapt. My RcppStreams package was one, and we made an update release 0.1.2 just yesterday. This BH release was also preceded by another reverse-depends check on the weekend.

Sine the 1.66 release of BH, CRAN tightened policies some more. Pragmas suppressing compiler warnings are now verboten so I had to disable a few. Expect compilations of packages using Boost, and BH, to be potentially very noisy. Consider adding flags to your local ~/.R/Makeconf and we should add them to the src/Makevars as much as we can (eg my ticket #3961 to dplyr). Collecting a few of these on a BH wiki page may not be a bad idea.

A list of our local changes follows. The diff to upstream Boost is in the repo as well.

Changes in version 1.69.0-1 (2019-01-07)

• Upgraded to Boost 1.69.0 (plus the few local tweaks)

• Applied the standard minimal patch with required changes, as well as the newer changeset for diagnostics pragma suppression.

• Following a pre-release in December, maintainers of three packages affected by the 1.66 to 1.69 were contacted, and changes were prepared.

Via CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to the previous release.

Comments and suggestions about BH are welcome via the mailing list or the issue tracker at 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.