[R-SIG-Mac] Problems loading Rcmdr on a Mac 10.7.2 and a Mac 10.6.8

[John Fox]

Dear David,

On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 01:04:18 -0700
 David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> On Sep 18, 2013, at 8:47 PM, John Fox wrote:
> 

. . .

> > It also seems apparent from the error message that there's a mismatch between the version of Tcl/Tk, presumably the one supplied with the R distribution, and the version of X-Windows.
> 
> That is not what I am reading. libfreetype.6 version 13 is the reported problem with  a need to update to version 14.
> 

Do you know where libfreetype.6 comes from? Is it installed independently of Tcl/Tk and XQuartz? If so, do you know how to update it?

. . .

> I'm not really a student but maybe this will be useful anyway. There is a version of Tk at:
> 
> http://r.research.att.com/src/tk8.6.0-src.tar.gz
> 
> ... which appears to be the most up-to-date version. I'm actually running version 8.5 with OSX 10.7.5
> 

Version 8.6-0 of Tcl/Tk for X-Windows is included in the R 3.0.1 installer for Mac OS X. Is it possible that it doesn't get installed if there's already a Tcl/Tk for X-Windows installed?

. . .

> 
>  The error message below says that libfreetype.6 is an old version and that you need version 14.0 for libtk8.6
> 
> From Unix cmd line:
> 
> otool -L /opt/local/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib
> 
> # ---- reports ___________
> /opt/local/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib:
> 	/opt/local/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib (compatibility version 16.0.0, current version 16.0.0)
> 	/opt/local/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.7)
> 	/opt/local/lib/libbz2.1.0.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.6)
> 	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 125.2.11)
> 

So tcltk and the Rcmdr 2.0-0 work on your system because you have a sufficiently up-to-date libfreetype.6. It would be additionally helpful to be able to answer the following questions:

(1) Why is it that some users have old versions of libfreetype.6.

(2) Why doesn't installing the newest versions of R (which includes Tcl/Tk) and XQuartz, not solve this problem?

(3) What can users experiencing this problem do to fix it?

If I knew the answers to these questions, I could update the Rcmdr installation notes to help users avoid the problem.

Thank you for your help,
 John