[R-SIG-Mac] Feedback to Apple?

[Dan Putler]

Hi,

Let me second Joerg van den Hoff's call for better X11 support. I'm  
using R via a modified version of the R Commander GUI (that uses the  
tcltk package, which requires X11 on the OS X platform) in a couple  
of different classes. One thing that I found frustrating is that  
Apple seems to be going to greater lengths overtime to hide the  
X11user.pkg. This makes installing R on OS X seem really complicated  
to students. The installation of the course software is comparatively  
much more straightforward on the Windows side, leaving the  
unfortunate impression that Windows is more suited to statistical  
computing.

Dan

On 21-Mar-07, at 4:49 AM, Joerg van den Hoff wrote:

> 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
>
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