[R-SIG-Mac] Feedback to Apple?

[Joerg van den Hoff]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 07:37:14PM -0400, Geoffrey Hutchison wrote:
> 
> Hello fellow R users!
> 
> I'm currently serving as a committee member at MacResearch.org, a  
> website devoted to science, math, and statistics on  Macs. In about  
> two weeks, we'll be visiting Apple to talk about issues, needs,  
> desires of science users and developers:
> http://www.macresearch.org/ 
> macresearch_science_related_requests_for_apple
> 
> So I was writing to ask if you have particular questions or concerns  
> which I can proxy? I think this is particularly important, since none  
> of the other MacResearch representatives are statistics folks. (I'm a  
> chemist -- I'm a happy user of R for data exploration and analysis.)
> 
> For example, are all the R.app compiler problems solved? Do we need  
> graphing/plotting libraries for visualization from Apple? What  
> feedback can I pass along?
> 
> Many thanks,
> -Geoff

hello,

I don't have a R- specific issue. what I _can_ say is, that for Macs to be
accepted in scientific environments it's mandatory, that the bare bones UNIX
side of OSX, notably full screen X11 is working competitivly to, say, LINUX or
FreeBSD machines. for scientific purposes I find the combination of some Aqua
apps and many X11 apps and UNIX utilities especially helpful and superior to
using anything else.

right now X11 is OK (but not optimal), but I don't know, how the future support
for that area will look like.

so if you could transport the message, that many many tools require X11 and
many scientists are UNIX 'addicts', this might help (although they sshould know).

what I have noted is, that e.g. manpage support is no good: it seems that
quite a few of them are out of sync with the actual state of affairs.

one specific wish would be a 'canonical' rsync supporting HFS+ stuff, such
as aliases, too. (they did it with `cp', for instance). same for other UNIX
utilities which copy data (dd, tar, ...).

joerg