[R-SIG-Mac] R version on gifi

[Jan de Leeuw]

Standard Apple stuff (such as anything in /usr, including X11) will
not be included in the installer package, but everything needed in  
/usr/local
will

I assume it will work with XFree86/XDarwin and with OroborosX, but
I am not going to test it with those, because I don't use them anymore.

I am sure that if more people want /sw, then it will just stay in. I am
just saying that as far as my distribution (and Stefano's) are concerned
it is not needed any more.

Of course you can always use it if you want to by setting LDFLAGS.

I try to avoid fink because it is a maze of nasty dependencies between
packages, which we do not need for R. It is also very inconvenient
and potentially disastrous to have duplicates of binaries and dynamic
libs in /sw and /usr/local and /usr. For instance, when Apple added
ncurses, many things went wrong. Fink is getting more and more
system-foo packages to deal with cases in which there are alternative
installs, and this will obviously become worse over time as more and
more gets added to Darwin. So (a) from the point of view of R
fink is overkill, and (b) fink has been great to have around for three
years but it is reaching the end of its usefulness period. Only my
opinion, of course.

Your impression that R is moved away from "just another Unix
variant" is correct only insofar as RAqua is being added as another
GUI. All the other GUIs (Terminal, Tcl/Tk, XTerm) remain available,
and for those savvy enough to build R fink and gnome can still be
used. There will just be no binaries.

--- Jan


On Monday, Jun 16, 2003, at 11:45 US/Pacific, Don MacQueen wrote:

> Couple of questions...
>
> Thanks
> -Don
>
> At 10:00 AM -0700 6/16/03, Jan de Leeuw wrote:
>> Pretty soon, hopefully, the RAqua version will make the Darwin/X11
>> version unnecessary. In the meantime, for convergence, I'll modify  
>> the Gifi
>> version in various ways.
>>
>> -- It's 1.7.1
>> -- It no longer supports gnome
>> -- It still uses Tcl/Tk for X11 (using 8.5 from CVS)
>> !!  It no longer uses anything from fink (readline and dlcompat
>>     as on Stefano's site, jpeg and png and teTeX from Gerben Wierda's
>>     i-installer, Tcl/Tk from cvs, X11 from Apple)
>
> Is the user expected to have separately installed any or all of these  
> various libraries, or are they included in the R distribution and  
> installed by the R installer? Or what?
>
> Specifically for X11, does it assume the user has separately installed  
> Apple's X11 and QuartzWM, and if so, is it in any way dependent on  
> anything unique to Apple's X11? That is, will it work if the user is  
> using XFree86/XDarwin and some (any) other window manager?
>
>> -- the package installer will put everything in /usr/local
>>
>> This means that all references to /sw in configure.ac can go.
>
> Do you mean that at some point in the future you intend that the  
> configure.ac in the source distribution will remove all references to  
> /sw? I'm not sure this is a good idea; I think I would prefer to have  
> the option of building from sources using fink for those other things  
> (readline, jpeg, png, tetex, etc) if I want to. Otherwise I have to  
> learn how to get them from several other sites, increasing my system  
> maintenance load and making it harder to keep them up to date.
>
> 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.
>
>>  This
>> next distribution will appear probably on wednesday. Undoubtedly
>> some packages will break, because they still use stuff from /sw,
>> but I'll fix those as we go along.
>> ===
>> Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics;
>> Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical  
>> Software
>> US mail: 9432 Boelter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554
>> phone (310)-825-9550;  fax (310)-206-5658;  email:  
>> deleeuw at stat.ucla.edu
>> homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu
>
>
> --  
> --------------------------------------
> Don MacQueen
> Environmental Protection Department
> Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
> Livermore, CA, USA
> --------------------------------------
>
>
===
Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics;
Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical  
Software
US mail: 9432 Boelter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554
phone (310)-825-9550;  fax (310)-206-5658;  email: deleeuw at stat.ucla.edu
homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu
   
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