[Rd] Re: [R-SIG-Mac] R version on gifi

[Don MacQueen]

Couple of questions...

Thanks
-Don

At 10:00 AM -0700 6/16/03, Jan de Leeuw wrote:
>Pretty soon, hopefully, the RAqua version will make the Darwin/X11
>version unnecessary. In the meantime, for convergence, I'll modify the Gifi
>version in various ways.
>
>-- It's 1.7.1
>-- It no longer supports gnome
>-- It still uses Tcl/Tk for X11 (using 8.5 from CVS)
>!!  It no longer uses anything from fink (readline and dlcompat
>     as on Stefano's site, jpeg and png and teTeX from Gerben Wierda's
>     i-installer, Tcl/Tk from cvs, X11 from Apple)

Is the user expected to have separately installed any or all of these 
various libraries, or are they included in the R distribution and 
installed by the R installer? Or what?

Specifically for X11, does it assume the user has separately 
installed Apple's X11 and QuartzWM, and if so, is it in any way 
dependent on anything unique to Apple's X11? That is, will it work if 
the user is using XFree86/XDarwin and some (any) other window manager?

>-- the package installer will put everything in /usr/local
>
>This means that all references to /sw in configure.ac can go.

Do you mean that at some point in the future you intend that the 
configure.ac in the source distribution will remove all references to 
/sw? I'm not sure this is a good idea; I think I would prefer to have 
the option of building from sources using fink for those other things 
(readline, jpeg, png, tetex, etc) if I want to. Otherwise I have to 
learn how to get them from several other sites, increasing my system 
maintenance load and making it harder to keep them up to date.

Can you give specific and substantive reasons why fink should be avoided?

I get the impression that R for OS X is being moved away from being 
another unix R variant (in the sense that Solaris, various Linuxes, 
SGI, etc. are unix variants), and moved toward being a specialized 
platform-specific version. Assuming my impression is more or less 
correct, I'd like to understand the pros and cons of this move.

>  This
>next distribution will appear probably on wednesday. Undoubtedly
>some packages will break, because they still use stuff from /sw,
>but I'll fix those as we go along.
>===
>Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics;
>Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical Software
>US mail: 9432 Boelter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554
>phone (310)-825-9550;  fax (310)-206-5658;  email: deleeuw at stat.ucla.edu
>homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu


-- 
--------------------------------------
Don MacQueen
Environmental Protection Department
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA, USA