Separate rpy2 dependency from releases due to GPL license incompatibility

[bobbai00]

Task Summary

The rpy2 library is licensed under GPLv2+, which falls under Category X in the ASF 3rd Party License Policy. Apache projects cannot include GPL-licensed dependencies in their releases.
We need to implement a mechanism to exclude rpy2 from our official release artifacts while still allowing developers to optionally use it in development/testing environments.

Priority

P2 – Medium

Task Type

• Code Implementation
• Documentation
• Refactor / Cleanup
• Testing / QA
• DevOps / Deployment

[bobbai00]

@Yicong-Huang Can you chime in on this?

[Yicong-Huang]

Let's remove the rpy2 and R support for now. I can host those changes as a patch somewhere else. We will have to declare no official R support in this release.

cc @chenlica @kunwp1

[chenlica]

I am OK with this plan. @pjfanning Do you have any suggestion?

[pjfanning]

• it might be best to have a separate non-ASF release that adds R support - something that uses the ASF release but that adds R support as opposed to a full clone
• the source and build and this R support module would be best to live in a non-ASF git repo

[chenlica]

We do have users of R UDFs. @bobbai00 @Yicong-Huang Please suggest a plan considering the comments of @pjfanning .

[Yicong-Huang]

Yeah I think that's what I meant by hosting a patch for R somewhere else. But officially we cannot say Apache Texera release supports R. We can redirect users of R UDF to the patch, and the R-enabled release.