[R-SIG-Mac] Do Darwinports and R play nice on Tiger?

[Steve Revilak]

> From: Douglas Bates 
> Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2008 07:54:32 -0500
> Subject: [R-SIG-Mac] Do Darwinports and R play nice on Tiger?

> I would like to install gnucash on a Macbook running OS X 10.5.4.  It
> appears that I would need either Fink or Darwinports installed to
> install gnucash.  Because my past experiences with Fink have not been
> positive I am considering installing Darwinports.  However, I notice
> that they want me to override many system libraries with their
> versions of the libraries (http://gnucash.darwinports.com/install/).
> Am I likely to cause problems with R running on this system if I do
> so?

I have around 40 Darwinports packages installed on Mac OS X 10.4.11
(but not gnucash), along with R (CRAN binaries) and a texlive
distribution; I also have a similar arrangement on another machine
running Mac OS X 10.5.4 (albeit with fewer Darwinports packages).  In
general, I've found Darwinports to be very reliable, and I've never
had problems with Darwinports interfering with R or tex (or vice
versa).

If you're truly worried, you can always append /opt/local/bin to your
PATH instead of prepending it.

Some Darwinports packages have a lot of dependencies.  However,
Darwinports seems to install everything in /opt/local, along with
supplying the appropriate library directories during compilation.

I don't see any harm in installing gnucash via Darwinports.  If, later
on, you suspect that Darwinports is causing a conflict with some other
software on your machine, you can easily confirm (or refute) that
suspicion by renaming /opt/local to /opt/local.NO.  Or, just uninstall
it.
For gnucash, installing via a package management system seems like the
safest bet.  IIRC, gnucash depends on a lot of libraries that aren't
part of Mac OS (e.g., gnome).

Steve