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

stefano iacus stefano.iacus at unimi.it
Tue Oct 13 10:53:25 CEST 2009


On 12/ott/2009, at 19.15, Simon Urbanek wrote:

> 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.

for what matters, I totally second Simon view (and experience)

stefano

>
>
>> 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
>
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-----------------------------------
Stefano M. Iacus
Department of Economics,
Business and Statistics
University of Milan
Via Conservatorio, 7
I-20123 Milan - Italy
Ph.: +39 02 50321 461
Fax: +39 02 50321 505
http://www.economia.unimi.it/iacus
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