[R-SIG-Mac] installXLSXsupport() error

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jul 16, 2012, at 12:43 PM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> On 16/07/2012 17:17, Davor Cubranic wrote:
>> You didn't have to go through the command line. In the R GUI's
>> package installer, if you switched package repository to "CRAN
>> (sources)", you would have found XLConnect there too.
>> 
>> You don't mention the version of OS X you're running, but for me with
>> Lion and R 2.15.1, I have the same problem. Most binary packages on
>> CRAN will not be found, and so I always choose to install from
>> source.
> 
> That's not true for me.  Currently 3808 binary packages are available out of 3912 source packages, and all the *binary* packages should be found (but XLConnect is not one of those).  If you are seeing something different, do
> 
> (a) try the CRAN master
> (b) report if R.app is not seeing all the packages there.
> 
> The errors can be seen at http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_XLConnect.html: it seems the CRAN Mac build machine does have problems with several packages using rJava.  Since the latter is Simon's package, he is probably well aware of it.
> 

No, it's a problem (or feature) in XLConnect using Java 1.6 classes which are unsupported on OS X (only Java 1.5 or lower is supported in 32 and 64-bit).
 

> It is worth pointing out that Java on OS X is something of a security nightmare, and maybe especially on Leopard (which the build machine perforce runs).  A couple of my students have found (the hard way) that Macs are not immune to malware.
> 

Apple has abandoned Java few years ago, so it's just lingering there (all new installations come without Java) - yes, it's not a good situation. Oracle has promised taking over but it's still a mess.

Cheers,
Simon