[R-SIG-Mac] Default install: add tcl and Fortran by default?

[Simon Urbanek]

Timothy,

On Oct 7, 2005, at 9:34 AM, Timothy Bates wrote:

> Just a thought: Given that most users will not be pushed for disk  
> space, why not make the tcl and Fortran options part of the default  
> install?

There were basically three reasons why we made it optional (and it  
was not the disk space):
a) there are more versions of Tcl/Tk and g77 around, so installing it  
over an existing could cause unwanted trouble in such a setup. If you  
know what you're doing, you know how to enable it.
b) default Mac OS X doesn't even include developer tools, so it's of  
no use to install g77 then. In that case you should stick with binary  
packages anyway. If you know about compiling packages from sources,  
then you know that you need a compiler so you can enable it.
c) both g77 and Tcl/Tk are not pure native applications - they go  
into /usr/local which shouldn't be needed on a Mac - it's the unix  
way to run things and R for Mac OS X tries to be as close to the "Mac  
spirit" as possible. This is, of course, arguable, because you can  
see OS X as a BSD unix with nice desktop or as a Mac operating system  
with unix under hood, but doing thing the "Apple way" has proven to  
be more reliable across OS versions.

However, I'm open for suggestions and changing the installation  
default is easy to do.

> This will obviate many questions (tcl is needed for packages like  
> Rcmdr, Fortran if packages are from source (more rather than less  
> likely for Mac users)

The rationale is that for Mac users it's very rare that you compile  
packages from source - as I said, it's not even possible with stock  
OS X.

> , and can always be turned off by a simple click in custom install.

It can as easily be turned on ;). The troubles were rather caused by  
wrong authentication of the g77 installer, but that's fixed in 2.2.0.

Cheers,
Simon