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

[peter dalgaard]

On Sep 20, 2013, at 08:49 , Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>> 
> 
> I am not so sure about that.  It will do no harm running CRAN binary R.  But it does mean that there are multiple versions of X11 things about and that will cause problems for other things (including possibly installing packages from source).


Or, put differently, we could be shipping libraries that are incompatible with the system libraries (or 3rd party libraries for that matter) if those are not kept up to date. 

Of course, keeping versions compatible is exactly what package managers are for, on systems that have them. The way things work on commercial platforms tend to lead each applicationq into rolling everything you need into the application itself, which is - in the bigger perspective - wasteful and somewhat risky (as defective components only get replaced upon upgrade of the application). 

I know Simon distrusts them, but sometimes I do feel that we should work more closely with the people doing managed distributions for OSX, i.e. MacPorts, Homebrew, Fink. (Not sure how they'd cope with missing OS updates, though.)

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com