hi folks, I have noticed there is work under way to prepare Apache Arrow for submission to the CRAN package manager for R users. I'm slightly concerned about the lack of information and documentation in the project regarding what is involved with this effort. This patch in particular raised some eyebrows
https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/3932 This introduces a dependency into the project on pre-built static libraries based on processes that aren't documented in the project. I see this repository containing these static libraries for the R Windows toolchain, but if I needed to produce them myself I would not know what to do https://github.com/rwinlib/arrow Additionally, in general, if I wanted to build and test Arrow and R from source on Windows, I also would not know what to do. In the Python world, this would be akin to depending on e.g. conda-forge packages for Windows development, but not having any information in the repository about to build Arrow C++ and Python from source on Windows. So I would like to see some transparency / documentation around the scripts and processes involved with this so that we don't end up with a "bus factor" problem where Arrow PMC members are unable to undertake basic maintenance and release management activities. Currently the work that is going on seems opaque to me and as such feels contrary to the Apache Way. I understand that there is some urgency to make the Arrow libraries available to R users, but I want to make sure we are working in a sustainable manner to grow a community of developers who are able to do work on each part of the project. Thanks, Wes
