R-alpha: Re: Separation of Program & Doc; REQUIRING Perl5 [was: New Version]

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> Douglas Bates writes:

> Regarding Perl5 availability:
>  - In the Unix world I would be surprised if people who would want to
>    install R would not also have access to perl5 or be able to install
>    it.  I would assert that the level of skill required to install R
>    is comparable to that required to install perl.

:-)

Btw, does CPAN have binary distributions as well?

>  - For Mac or Windows are you expecting that most users would install
>    from the .tar.gz file?  I would have thought that there would be
>    one compilation done to create a .zip file for Windows and a .hqx
>    file for the Mac.  The typical user would only need to install
>    these "tar-ball" files and never need to see the part that depended 
>    on perl.  If someone decides to write an R function that calls perl 
>    then it will croak but the same would happen for shell scripts, awk 
>    scripts, ...

I am confused now.  I thought the advantage of Perl is that it is
available on non-Unix platforms as well ...?

(Of course, that does not solve the `packaging' problem ...)

-k

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