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

[James Wettenhall]

Hi Stefano,

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, stefano iacus wrote:
> what you can reasonably do James, is to ask your system manager to
> install the tcltk stuff and the developer tools (how can you build your
> packages without?).

My GUI packages are just R packages with no compiled code.  They
just use the tcltk package, e.g. tt<-tktoplevel() etc.  I don't
have a Mac in my office, so I like to build a Win32 binary .zip
version and a .tar.gz source version of each R package from
Windows.  Then I would hope that R on MacOSX could install a
.tar.gz "source" R package without developer tools (given that
there's only R code, no compiled C or Fortran code).  Of
course, I've noticed on CRAN, that Mac OS X binary versions of
R packages are starting to appear, so maybe I should do that as
well.  But for now I'm just trying to learn a nice way to
install my R packages (requiring the standard tcltk + Tktable
and BWidget) for Mac users without the developer tools.

On Windows, there's no multiple Tcl/Tk issue, so my R package's
.First.lib() looks in the Windows registry for ActiveTcl (the
standard Tcl/Tk distribution for Windows) and automatically
runs addTclPath() from within R so that Tktable and BWidget can
be found and gives a warning if ActiveTcl is not found.   But
I still allow a custom Tcl/Tk installation), e.g. the user can
run addTclPath() themself from R or they can set environment
variables TCL_LIBRARY="C:\Tcl\lib" and MY_TCLTK="Yes".

Maybe I can eventually do something similar (to what I do
with ActiveTcl) with TclTkAquaBI.

Best regards,
James