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

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Simon Urbanek wrote:

> 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.

It's a documented part of TweakUI, and I find it very usable.  After all, 
it I have my mouse over something on the toolbar, I have deliberately
moved focus there (just as in CDE), and it is very natural to someone
used to this from a good Unix windows manager.  Only a very few 
applications cause me problems (most notably the Visual Basic IDE).

> > 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? 

It could be.  Checking them is not, though.

> 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...

At DSC we seemed to decide that we would need a binary packages mechanism 
for the GUI MacOS X port.  I suspect you underestimate the difficulties 
(or overestimate the abilities of the users concerned): the Windows
experience is that is hard to overestimate the ability of the users to 
make stupid errors and not realize what.


As for this being `just another unix version': if only!  Simple things on
any other unix-alike like making a Rlapack dynamic library became major
headaches on darwin, only, and that is still not fully resolved.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595