[R-SIG-Mac] install.packages default type change?

[stefano iacus]

Bill,
my personal experience (which dates 2001 on R for Mac) is that I  
receive dozen of user's feedback and they even don't know what a  
compiler is. They don't even know where to find the Dev Tools on the  
distribution. And that's the reason why we provide binaries.
More over, I know about people that know what a compiler is and they  
installed DevTools but when you talk about X11 they are lost: they  
install the X11 application and they think they also have header  
files installed which is untrue as apple made this an optional  
install on devtool cd. (I've got this kind of report two days ago!)
You are a quite advanced "user".


stefano





On 23/lug/05, at 05:38, Bill Northcott wrote:


> On 22/07/2005, at 8:00 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>
>
>>> In the past, I believe that MacOS X users could use
>>> install.packages()
>>> successfully without any package 'type' specification, even though
>>> there
>>> is no .tgz file, but now it seems that they need to explicitly say:
>>>
>>> install.packages(..., type="source")
>>>
>>> Right?
>>>
>>> Is this a permanent change?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> yes
>>
>>
>>
>>> Is this a permanent change?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> FWIW: strictly speaking this is not a new change - the documentation
>> was describing exactly this behavior for a while - it was merely a
>> bug that the package installation implementation wasn't really
>> following the documentation.
>>
>> The main reason for this behavior is that unlike other unix systems
>> OS X comes by default without development tools, so you simply cannot
>> use type="source". Therefore the default is to use binary packages
>> which is the recommended way.
>>
>>
>
> I am not sure this is a good decision.  MacOS X is always supplied
> with the Xcode development tools, which is not true of all the UNIXen
> I have dealt with.  It is really only Linux that I know to install
> developer tools as part of the default install and even then it is
> usually necessary to install header packages to actually build
> anything.  Finally I doubt that there are many R users on MacOS X who
> do not have the Developer Tools installed, after all, they need X11
> which is also an optional install.  Indeed you supply g77 as part of
> the CRAN binary, and that is useless if you don't have the Developer
> Tools.
>
> Bill Northcott
>
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