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!
This version fixes a number of issues that had been compiled in the issue tracker on the project site at Google Code. Tomoaki Nishiyama, who joined our small development group for his package a few weeks ago, was instrumental in a number of these fixes, with assistance from Joe Conway.
The relevant NEWS file entry follows below:
Version 0.1-7 -- 2010-10-17
o Several potential buffer overruns were fixed
o dbWriteTable now writes a data.frame to database through a network
connection rather than a temporary file. Note that row_names may be
changed in future releases. Also, passing in filenames instead of
data.frame is not supported at this time.
o When no host is specified, a connection to the PostgreSQL server
is made via UNIX domain socket (just like psql does)
o Table and column names are case sensitive, and identifiers are escaped
or quoted appropriately, so that any form of table/column names can be
created, searched, or removed, including upper-, lower- and mixed-case.
o nullOk in dbColumnInfo has a return value of NA when the column does
not correspond to a column in the table. The utility of nullOk is
doubtful but not removed at this time.
o Correct Windows getpid() declaration (with thanks to Brian D. Ripley)
o A call of as.POSIXct() with a time format string wrongly passed to TZ
has been corrected; this should help with intra-day timestamps (with
thanks to Steve Eick)
o Usage of tmpdir has been improved on similarly to Linux (with thanks
to Robert McGehee)
More information is on the my RPostgreSQL page, and on project site at Google Code.