[Rd] Possible To Enable Building R With Cairo But Without X11 Dependencies?

[Stephen Marsh]

Hello,

So the Homebrew community dropped support for --with-cairo which is a shame
because --without-x --with-cairo is an important combination for any
environment that might need to generate graphics without X11 (or related)
dependencies (macOS, headless linux servers).

This rejected GitHub PR contains more detail:
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/24094

(See also these comments:
https://github.com/uluyol/homebrew-core/commit/c377e6ebb3c7bc8fe6edf098e259d76e9935aacf
)

Specifically:

“It looks like the only issue is their configure scripts using cairo-xlib.h
instead of cairo.h, but to be honest I'm not familiar with the code. If
they remove the dependency, I think the default homebrew R could probably
enable cairo by default.”

I suppose my general questions are:
1) Is this actually the case? You cannot successfully build R with Cairo
capabilities but without X11 dependencies?
2) If so, is it possible to fix this in a future release of R?

Thanks a lot,
-Stephen Marsh

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