[R-SIG-Mac] [moderator] Re: R 2.1.1 available in DarwinPorts

[stefano iacus]

On 08/set/05, at 03:11, Bill Northcott wrote:

> 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}.
>

I think that there is no reason why we should not help Kjell to build  
R in his set up provided that we can help and that Kjell follow our  
suggestions (Simon has written several times what's going wrong and  
why... thus why not considering these suggestions?).

As for daily testing of darwinports: r-sig-mac is probably NOT the  
right place, maybe darwinports has it's own list for that purpose. Or  
maybe Kjell can correspond with some testers privately and report  
here success or ask for solutions.

What Simon says about compiler dependencies REALLY matters and it is  
something to take care in particular for binary distributions.

Apple is doing great work in including more and more system  
libraries, and there's no reason why not using these if available.
Apple is also helping other open source project in having their  
products build out-of-the box on OS X for the reason explained by  
Bill in this mail.


stefano


> 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
>
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