[R-SIG-Mac] Compiling R.app with 2.12 on Intel Mac 10.4

[Simon Urbanek]

Nick,

unfortunately I have no longer any 10.4 machines, but some comments inline.

On Mar 29, 2011, at 3:20 AM, Nick Matzke wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Slightly weird question, I'm mostly hoping there is some obvious thing that I am missing.
> 
> At the moment, I am stuck on a 10.4 machine (32-bit Intel mac).  However, there is an R package I need to use, that requires R 2.12.  So, being brave, I downloaded the R 2.12.2 source and compiled that.  That part worked fine.
> 

How did you configure it? For the GUI to work properly you'll probably need to set r_arch=i386 (it's needed for universal build, but a single-arch GUI may work without it).


> Then, since I like R.app, I downloaded the source for the most recent version of that ( Mac-GUI-1.35 ) and compiled it using Xcode 2.5.
> 

FWIW the latest [possibly] supporting 10.4 is 1.36 which is in
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/Mac-GUI-1.36.tar.gz


> It actually seems to work, installs packages, etc.  However the one weird thing I am noticing is that when I type a variable name that does not exist yet, R.app crashes as follows:
> 
> =============
> > undefined_variable
> Error: object 'undefined_variable' not found
> 
> *** caught bus error ***
> address 0x0, cause 'non-existent physical address'
> 
> Possible actions:
> 1: abort (with core dump, if enabled)
> 2: normal R exit
> 3: exit R without saving workspace
> 4: exit R saving workspace
> Selection:
> =============
> 
> Similar errors do not occur in the command line R 2.12.2, nor in previous versions of R.app on my computer.
> 
> One possibility is that in my xcode compilation my Active Build Configuration was "Development", not "Deployment" -- however, the compilation threw an error when I switched it to "Deployment".
> 

You can use Deployment (and should) but since you likely didn't build ppc version of R, you'll have to change the builds setting to not compile ppc version of the GUI (double-click on the "R" project icon in Xcode select Deployment config and change "Architectures" to just yours; if that's not enough, double-click on "R" in "Targets" to make sure it's not overridden there).

Cheers,
Simon