[R-SIG-Mac] Clarification of R-Tcl/Tk installation wish-list

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jul 7, 2004, at 2:15 AM, James Wettenhall wrote:

> If R-Tcl/Tk could be installed without the developer tools,

It can always be installed w/o developer tools. If you're worried about 
add-ons then I'd rather worry about X11 which isn't installed by 
default ;).

> Does anyone else like the idea of having an option of installing
> Tcl/Tk binaries in $R_HOME/Tcl/ in the same way that it is done
> on Windows?  See "R_Tcl.zip" on Duncan Murdoch's webpage:
> http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/

Well, it's one way to go ... I guess the problem is that there is not 
just one Tck/Tk for OS X. The native versions come as frameworks which 
makes sense. Supplying X11 versions as frameworks is questionable, but 
possible. Since the X11 versions are not really Mac-native, they 
probably shouldn't "shadow" the native way (frameworks)... I guess some 
people think they should go to /usr/local/...

> Now, as far as adminstrator privileges, it looks like I still
> have a bit to learn about the difference between root and
> administrator on Mac OS X.

root - user with all privileges - this one is by default disabled in OS 
X (i.e. you can't directly login as root)
admin - an user belonging to the "admin" group which is used throughout 
the system (e.g. you can write in Applications) also can use sudo to 
run commands in the root context

>   But my desire should be clear - to
> be able to double-click the R installer from R.dmg and install
> it in a custom directory (without getting an error message
> saying that it requires administrator privileges).

There's no error message :P Anyway, but "custom directory" is a 
problem. Not from the installer point of view - you can install 
anything anywhere, but R is not easily relocatable. The only way to 
relocate R is to patch all binaries and modify dynamic references. It 
can be done, but is tedious and error-prone. This is why we have the 
fixed framework and relocatable R.app.

> Maybe non-administrator installation in a custom directory is
> more difficult on Mac OS X than on Windows, because Mac OS X is
> based on Unix where it is natural to choose the --prefix for
> configure BEFORE building from source (so the binaries may
> contain absolute directory paths).  Similarly, some RPMs on
> Linux can only be installed in one place.  Can Mac OS X be
> more flexible, like R for Windows?

It's not really a question of the operating system being more flexible 
or not. It's the way things are linked, built and installed. IMHO the 
building process could be slightly modified to allow relocatable R 
framework (don't use paths in linked objects and rely on LIBRARY_PATH). 
However there are some issues with add-ons such as newly compiled 
packages. The main problem is that we would need to kind of `bypass' 
the framework concept and use our own concept that requires several 
preparations before R or libR can be used (setting correct LP etc.) -  
and that's what we wanted to prevent. Moreover you could create 
inconsistencies when libraries are loaded from somewhere else that 
you'd expect (which can happen on Windows).

Again, a compromise would be to fix all paths on install ...

But back to your issue: why would you want to insist on re-locatable 
framework? One way of achieving what you want would be to use one of 
the regular places like Applications or Users/Shared - at least I guess 
that should work for your biologists and you wouldn't have to think 
about OS X internals... Moreover if you want to deal with Tcl/Tk you 
ran into relocation issues, too.

Simon