[R-sig-Geo] MacOS spatial packages installation

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no> wrote:

> Yes, and there probably was then too, unless extra drivers were needed for
> GDAL or OGR, or where the latest GDAL or GEOS are needed. The OSX CRAN
> binaries are up to date on rgdal and rgeos, and not too far behind on the
> external dependencies, which are included statically built to remove the
> risk of complication - all thanks to Brian Ripley for starting the
> build process and Simon Urbanek for keeping it running.

So on a fresh OSX install, a Mac user can install R from CRAN via the
.pkg download, and then do install.packages("rgdal") to get a binary
without having to configure or download anything else? Same as
Windows? Nice.

That leaves Linux users fiddling with either needing root privs and
adding PPAs or installing from scratch with the libgdal-dev and
friends requirements....

> I don't have
> access to such a platform, so comments from those using it would be
> helpful. If the target users already have GEOS, GDAL, etc, installing from
> source should be OK if their machines are set up to install from source,
> but is obviously more demanding.

The binary approach should be ideal for my new workshop users.

I'll see if I can find a clean Mac later this week... Thanks!

Barry