[R] lme4 + R 2.11.0 + mac unavailable

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net>
>>>>>     on Mon, 17 May 2010 17:44:00 -0400 writes:

    > On May 17, 2010, at 5:01 PM, Adam November wrote:

    >> I believe I'm working with the newest version of R
    >> (2.11.0) and I've tried a few of the most recent
    >> versions... No luck yet.

    > Luck has nothing to do with it. What part of ERROR in the
    > CRAN package check for the current version of lme4 with
    > the Mac R 2.11.0 don't you understand? Packages that
    > generate errors are not made available as binaries.

    > I was giving you advice about how to deal with the stated
    > difficulty with installing lme4 from source using the
    > older versions of R. Only if you want to revert to 2.10.1
    > and install a prior version for lme4 would my advice be
    > helpful.

    > -- 
    > David.

Doug Bates and I had recently been contacted by another Mac user
about this.
Doug advised him to install  lme4  from the sources and
he was immediately successful.

In the light of this, I'm a bit puzzled about the harsh words
David is using with respect to the "cohabitation" of R 2.11.0
and lme4.

Simultaneously, we have been in contact with Simon Urbanek
trying to investigate why the 'R CMD check' tests fail on OSX
(http://www.r-project.org/nosvn/R.check/r-release-macosx-ix86/lme4-00check.html)
A conclusion/solution has not been found yet,
but as I said above, the advice to install from the source

   install.packages("lme4", type = "source")

One possible caveat -- as lme4 uses the C API of Matrix (including
the C header ("include") files it exports) --
is that for the above way of installation,
you need to install into the (or "a") library where Matrix is
installed.
For those who only use one library, this will not be
a concern.  Others could use the fact that MacOSX is a kind of Unix
and you can simply "symlink" Matrix (from the R standard
library) into the library into which you want to install lme4
{  cd <mylibrary>
   ln -s `R RHOME`/library/Matrix . 
}

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich

    >> Thanks, -Adam
    >> 
    >> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 1:51 PM, David Winsemius
    >> <dwinsemius at comcast.net > wrote:
    >>> 
    >>> On May 17, 2010, at 4:44 PM, Adam November wrote:
    >>> 
    >>>> Hi All, Just thought I'd bring attention to the fact
    >>>> that lme4 is failing cran checks on the mac platform,
    >>>> and I can't seem to install it from source on 10.5 or
    >>>> 10.6, either ("ld: library not found for -lgfortran ")
    >>>> .  Any help getting this working?  Thanks!
    >>> 
    >>> You would not expect the current package to install
    >>> properly with earlier versions of r. Find the
    >>> appropriate version at the archive:
    >>> 
    >>> http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/lme4/
    >>> 
    >>> --
    >>> 
    >>> David Winsemius, MD West Hartford, CT