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

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Don MacQueen wrote:
>
> 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.

I think the move is to stop *assuming* fink, not to forbid it.

There are at least two goals

1. To produce a binary OS X distribution for people who don't want to
learn Unix, including an (optional) GUI and an (optional) quartz() device
driver.  If you want to stick with a command line and x11(), you're
welcome to. If you want to compile from sources yourself you can competely
ignore the binary distribution. This binary can't install
anything in /sw (because that would clobber fink) and doesn't want to
assume that anything is already there.


2. To produce a simple minimal set of instructions and dependencies for
compiling R on Mac OS X. A set of instructions that includes installing
fink is (I fervently hope) not minimal.  Of course, if you already have
fink installed you can easily use it to get all the necessary software.

You might in future have to specify a configure option to get configure to
look in /sw for system libraries, but this makes it more similar to other
Unices, not less similar.


	-thomas