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

[Simon Urbanek]

On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 05:11  PM, Don MacQueen wrote:

>> The really native version doesn't really need to depend on X11 
>> anymore since the use of X11 on Mac OS X was meant for applications 
>> that are not properly ported to OS X yet. Once Quartz and RAqua are 
>> complete there is no need for X11.
>
> Except for one major flaw in Aqua--the absence of "focus follows 
> mouse", as it is sometimes called in an X
Yes, this is indeed a very nice feature (I've been using it on unix all 
time), but it can be disastrous at the same time. MS Windows has an 
undocumented registry key which allows you to enable this, but once you 
do that you'll realize that a lot of applications assume 
'topmost-has-focus' state and are almost unusable if the 
'focus-follows-mouse' is enabled (example: if you have a mouse over a 
toolbar your document window is inactive - most applications can't deal 
with that). I'm not sure about this in OS X (since we can't really test 
it ;P), but something similar might happen.

> Jan cited "Gerben Wierda's i-installer" as a source for jpeg, png, and 
> teTex. This source is somehow more "official" than fink? But, 
> considering what Jan says, i.e. "everything needed in /usr/local will" 
> be included with the installer package, it doesn't matter to the end 
> user.
Exactly, that's the point :) We don't want to assume things that are 
non-standard. We should provide them if necessary.

There is still one issue to consider in this context: source packages. 
A really 'plain' Mac OS X can't be used to install source packages 
as-is, basically because there are three missing things: Dev Tools, g77 
and latex. The first one is official, so we could require that (and 
probably have to). G77 is really just a few files, so the installer 
could add it if necessary, but I'm not sure about latex. Is building 
packages w/o latex documentation an option? The direct use of source 
packages seems to me as the greatest benefit of OSX being unix-based, 
therefore i wouldn't like to miss it, even if I was pure Mac user...

Cheers,
Simon

---
Simon Urbanek
Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis
University of Augsburg
Universitätsstr. 14
86135 Augsburg
Germany

Tel: +49-821-598-2236
Fax: +49-821-598-2200

Simon.Urbanek at Math.Uni-Augsburg.de
http://simon.urbanek.info