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

[Rainer M Krug]

peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.)

I completely agree here. 

I can only speak about homebrew, but one additional advantage is that to
have multiple versions of R installed (and switching between them) is
not a problem at all.

If there would be a kind of an official support, I would definitely
switch to the homwbrew version.

Cheers,

Rainer

-- 
Rainer M. Krug

email: RMKrug<at>gmail<dot>com