[R-SIG-Mac]around old MacOS support

[Peter Paul Sint]

My experience is that older Macs do not disappear. They end up in the hands of persons who cannot afford newer versions. We gave away old machines to Eastern Europe (at a time when they not yet tried to become members of the European Union) and to third world Africa. Some of it may end up with persons interested in statistics (not in our case but I am not in a statistics department). Before leaving the Carbon version I would like to see a detailled description of how to recompile R in MPW C. (If I understand Stefano, I guess to write such descriptions is not something he especially likes). This would show those inheriting (or installing) R on the older Macs how to compile a larger project which may be useful for them even if they will not work on R development any more. On the other hand some may take up  the task to keep Carbon-R alive for a while longer. This might give some feedback to Stefano (and he MIGHT like to give advice to those persons or continue working on it under those circumstances). As some of those will not have easy access to the Internet/Web, downloadable - offline transferable packages may help.

By the way: I used R a lot to produce and develop a large number of reasonably complex graphics (bar chart variety). For this carbonization of R was a big drop in performance. This seemed not to have been Stefanos fault but the use of the much slower carbonized version of the Waste (graphics) engine. I am only now in the process of switching slowly to OS X and did not start up R there at all. Use of more native graphics will probably help.

Peter Sint

At 11:56 Uhr +0100 14.11.2001, Stefano Iacus wrote:
>Thank you all for your comments. I'll take them into account.
>The real essential of what I meant was that: probably after 1.4 I'll not improve any further the Carbon Gui, I'll just recompile every release of R but very few bug fixing at each release. I probably will do that since the R kernel will not be substantially changed (release 2.x ? let's see.)
>
>Recompiling packages and R kernel is highly time consuming (trust me) and in same sense I enjoy it anyway, but it is a matter of fact that new iMacs are shipped since july with the OSX pre-installed. Old MacOS apple environments (like MPW for example) have been freezed as apple want developers and people to work on OS X.
>
>Probably I'm wrong, but people with old hardware that cannot objectively switch to OS X are probably limited in the choice of applications available just now. Professionals or university depts have to switch sooner or later (I guess sooner) to OS X otherwise they will be obliged to work with old releases of applications (and so why not with an old release of R ?).
>
>Stefano
-- 
Peter Paul Sint (sint@oeaw.ac.at, http://www.iwe.oeaw.ac.at/sint )
RU - Institutional Change and European Integration, 
Austrian Academy of Sciences ICE, Baeckerstr.13
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