[R-SIG-Mac] Cairo / X11 problem in Mavericks

[Jeroen Ooms]

>> R exists with a warning that X11 is required.
> You need to re-install XQuartz after an update.  See the R-admin manual.

I'm not sure I understand (apologies, I'm not really a mac user). We
are using these devices in non-interactive R sessions (RApache,
RScript). So the Cairo devices can only be used on machines that have
xquartz is installed? IIRC, we had some mac server at some point that
did not have xquartz but was still capable of generating cairo based
svg and png. The r-admin manual says "cairo support (without Pango)
has been added to the binary distribution".


>> Is there any way to use png() or svg() on Mavericks without installing xquartz?
> png() yes: use the quartz-based device.

Well part of the problem is that even running capabilities() to see if
Cairo is available at all makes R exit. Is this really expected
behavior?