[R-SIG-Mac] Feedback to Apple?

[Simon Urbanek]

On Mar 21, 2007, at 1:50 PM, Paul Roebuck wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Mar 2007, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>
>>>> On Tue, Mar 20, 2007, Geoffrey Hutchison wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> 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
>>>>> [SNIP]
>>>>> What feedback can I pass along?
>>
>> [SNIP X11 comments]
>>
>> Concerning R itself, my only worry (and a big headache) is the  
>> lack of Fortran support in Xcode. We have to install parallel  
>> compilers and system libraries which is a maintenance nightmare...
>
> To be fair, I don't expect Apple to officially support Fortran. It  
> WOULD be really nice, if they made sure they didn't break the G95  
> compiler with their other GCC changes and provided it unsupported  
> as an optional Xcode tool from available on their developer website.
>

I could live with that. Providing unsupported binaries would be  
great. Even just not breaking gfortran in their branch would be a  
huge step forward. It's not optimal (because we'd still have to deal  
with system updates), but better than the status quo.

Cheers,
Simon