[R-SIG-Mac] R 2.1.1 available in DarwinPorts

[Bill Northcott]

On 08/09/2005, at 9:45 AM, Kjell Konis wrote:
> R-SIG-MAC is an "R Special Interest Group on Macintosh Development  
> and Porting, both for MacOS 8.6 - 9.x and MacOS X"  Why does what  
> we're doing not count?

I don't see either of 'Fink' or 'Darwin Ports' in the list {MacOS  
8.6-9.x, MacOS X}.

Once you install Fink or Darwin Ports, you are no longer doing UNIX  
style builds on MacOS X, because you effectively replace many of the  
system libraries and, so it appears with Darwin Ports, the  
compilers.   You are now building with different UNIX system.

Back in the days of MacOS X 10.0 and 10.1, Fink and Darwin Ports were  
arguably useful.  With Tiger, they just get in the way and create  
trouble like the ones you are experiencing.  Almost all the basic GNU/ 
BSD libraries are available on Tiger.  About the only ones now  
missing will never be there. Apple will not ship GPL licensed  
libraries, because they might accidentally pollute a commercial  
developers code.  That is why there is no GNU readline for instance.

The open source libraries that are not included are now trivial to  
build without needing the wholesale changes of Fink or Darwin Ports.

Some one wrote that one needed to install the whole of FSF gcc to get  
g77.  This is not correct.  Everything needed to build R from source  
on Panther or Tiger is included in the Tcl/Tk and g77 packages of the  
R 2.1.1 binary distribution.

Building gfortran from Apple sources on Tiger is not hard.  However,  
it is necessary to include recent patches from the FSF gfortran  
gcc-4.0.x.  You can find an Apple gcc-4 compiler with gfortran which  
will build R on www.swarm.org.  I hope to build a more recent one as  
soon as the fixes for the equivalence problems in gfortran get  
committed to the cvs.  That should be within a few days.

There are those from the Linux camp who think gcc-4 is not such a  
good compiler as the recent gcc-3.x.  As recent tests published by  
Anandtech show, while this may be the case on x86 Linux, it is simply  
not true on MacOS X.

Bill Northcott