Fast-forward a few years. A caretaker group had maintained the package in the meantime, but without really writing any new code. But thanks to the tireless efforts of Tomoaki Nishiyama, who not only wrote a lot of new code addressing some of issues logged at the Google Code project page, but also stepped forward and became the new lead maintainer, things are much, much better now.
The first 0.2-0 release a few weeks ago already addressed a rather large number of issues,
bringing the feature set much closer to what one would expect from a feature-complete
package. But one big thorn remained: builds on Windows still required a
local PostgreSQL library installation as well as local compilation. And as we
can tell from the mailing list(s), this is a little daunting for many
potential users. But what did release 0.2-1 bring: a complete set of libpq
sources so that builds on Windows no longer require presence of local
PostgreSQL sources! We tested this using Uwe Ligges' excellent
win-builder service for R, and
after I reminded Uwe on the weekend to no longer blacklist build attempts of
RPostgreSQL, we
now have Windows binaries for direct installation. Just call
install.packages(), and you're good to go -- much nicer!
Tomoaki achieved this pretty much single-handedly, and for that reason he greatly deserves some extra praise as an unsung Open Source hero!