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

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jul 7, 2004, at 6:36 PM, stefano iacus wrote:

> On Jul 7, 2004, at 11:54 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>
>> 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).
>
> the R.framework per se is relocatable,

currently (as-is 1.9.1) it's not as I explained to James (I should've 
CC it here I guess) - R.bin and libR.dylib are both linked to readline 
using full path to the R home. There are several other minor issues 
like newly compiled packages containing absolute paths etc.

> 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?).

/me nods
@James: note that if you create your own, relocatable version of R you 
will have to check whether the CRAN packages work with it. If they 
won't then you're definitely in trouble, because installing packages is 
what most people need in the first place.

> Packages will be built in your local directory ~/Library/R/library, 
> tar.gz the binaries and distribute them. They will work.

Again, they will only work if at least the following is satisfied
1) they are relocatable - because every user's home is in a different 
path (and ~ is only a shell construct, not a valid path)
2) before loading the libraries some script will find the proper 
libraries and setup the environment correspondingly

However I still think that the best way is to use regular R 
installation in /Library/Frameworks ... it's supported, transparent and 
extensible. As I said before, installing X11 requires co-operation of 
the admin anyway, so he can as well install R, too.

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