[R-SIG-Mac] Source package installation under OSX 10.4 / R 2.10.1

[Simon Urbanek]

Rich,

On Jan 12, 2010, at 13:17 , Rich FitzJohn wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Sorry if this is the wrong place to post or if this has been  
> addressed elsewhere.  I am running R 2.10.1 under OS X 10.5  
> (Leopard).  After upgrading R from 2.10 to 2.10.1, I found that no  
> source package would install, with errors like:
>      gcc-4.2 -arch i386 -std=gnu99 -I/Library/Frameworks/ 
> R.framework...
>      make: gcc-4.2: Command not found
>      make: *** [bisse-eqs.o] Error 127
> (similar errors for any package containing C code that I tried).   
> The Xcode that U have does not include gcc 4.2, so it is surprising  
> to see it being selected.  I think I have the most recent Xcode  
> available for Leopard;

That's not true - gcc 4.2 is part of Xcode for quite some time on 10.5  
(Leopard) so your Xcode is definitely not recent. The latest Leopard  
one is Xcode 3.1.3.


> in any case, the only Xcode I seem to be able to get from apple  
> needs OSX 10.6.
>

Xcode 3.1.3 for Leopard is available from http://connect.apple.com  
(and so are all previous versions in fact).


> I have worked around this problem by creating a ~/.R/Makevars file  
> containing
> CC = gcc-4.0 -arch i386 -std=gnu99
> CFLAGS = -g -O2
> CXX = g++-4.0 -arch i386
> CXXCPP = g++-4.0 -arch i386 -E
> CXXFLAGS = -g -O2
> DYLIB_LD = gcc-4.0 -arch i386 -std=gnu99
> F77 = gfortran-4.0 -arch i386
> FC = gfortran-4.0 -arch i386
> FCFLAGS = -g -O2
> MAIN_LD = gcc-4.0 -arch i386 -std=gnu99
> OBJC = gcc-4.0 -arch i386
> OBJCFLAGS = -g -O2
> OBJCXX = g++-4.0 -arch i386
> SHLIB_CXXLD = g++-4.0 -arch i386
> SHLIB_FCLD = gfortran-4.0 -arch i386
> SHLIB_LD = gcc-4.0 -arch i386 -std=gnu99
>
> after which compilation succeeds (I had to both switch the version  
> numbers from 4.2 to 4.0 compared with R's Makevars and drop the - 
> mtune=core flag).
>
> I have a couple of questions
> (1) Will anything terrible happen as a consequence of doing this?

Maybe not. Older gcc versions have miscompield some code in the past  
so your milage will vary, but functionally in most cases you should be  
fine.


> (2) Does this situation mean that package compilation is no longer  
> supported on leopard?
>

No, you just need at least half-way recent Xcode.  I'm pretty sure  
that at least the 3.1 series always had gcc 4.2 and that was almost  
two years ago ...

FWIW the settings are not quite intentional - usually binaries get  
post-processed for the release (removing TeX paths, arch tuning and  
-4.2 postfix) but somehow in 2.10.1 this step failed.

Cheers,
Simon