[R-SIG-Mac] package management system: Fink vs MacPorts?

[Simon Urbanek]

Seth,

On Oct 12, 2009, at 12:18 , Seth Falcon wrote:

> Hi Christian,
>
> Unless you are doing development with R I would second Simon's
> suggestion to use the pre-packaged R binary.
>

Just to clarify -- I wasn't questioning building R from sources -- I  
was questioning why anyone would use Fink or MacPorts R binary since  
you lose the advantage of control over the build and yet you get a  
much more limited binary than the one from CRAN and you can't use CRAN  
package binaries, either.


> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 6:10 AM, Christian Kleiber
> <Christian.Kleiber at unibas.ch> wrote:
>> I am familiar with building R packages but I have never built R
>> from source (this might change, however). Question: any strong
>> opinions re Fink vs MacPorts? Or other solutions? (I have been using
>> Fink on my laptop for some time without problems but then I never  
>> built R
>> from source.)
>
> I have had better experiences with MacPorts vs Fink, although both
> have a tendency to pull in large sets of dependencies for libraries
> and tools that are already on your Mac.
>
> Recently, I've been using Homebrew [1] as an alternative.  Yes, it is
> yet another package manager.  One of its aims is to avoid duplicating
> libs that are already on a modern Mac.
>

Thank, Seth, I really like the Homebrew approach -- the real problem  
with MacPorts/Fink is that they mess up the system (if you use them)  
so Homebrew takes that out of the equation. I'll test it for a bit and  
see if we can even recommended that since it complements the binaries  
we provide ...

Thanks,
Simon