[R-SIG-Mac] Feedback to Apple?

[Jan de Leeuw]

Although better X11 support may be a step ahead for now, it is
a step in the wrong direction. Years ago we already had support
for Aqua Tcl/Tk in command-line R using the infamous event loop
hack. So what must be done is make sure both R.app and command-line
R support Aqua Tcl/Tk -- which is not something Apple can do.
R core has to tweak the event loop mechanism, and then we can all
get rid of the last vestiges of X11.

On Mar 21, 2007, at 7:55 AM, Dan Putler wrote:

> 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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>
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