[ARROW-15173] [R] Provide backward compatibility for bridge to older versions of pyarrow

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Blocker
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 7.0.0
• Component/s: R
• Labels: pull-request-available
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/30676
• Assignee: Dewey Dunnington
• Reporter: Dewey Dunnington
• Created: 21/Dec/21 16:45
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 08:44
• Resolved: 12/Jan/22 19:42

Description

After ARROW-15169 is merged, the Python--R bridge code will properly use external pointers to pass references to C API structures. The changes made on the R side will (probably) only work with the new pyarrow version. If it doesn't, it's not hard to provide backward compatibility:

pa <- reticulate::import("pyarrow")
if (package_version(pa$`__version__`) >= "6.0.0.9000") {
  # the new code
} else {
  # the old code
}
#> NULL

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #12062