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

[Berend Hasselman]

On 20-09-2013, at 11:29, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 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. 
> 

Systems such as Ubuntu release a new version every 6 months and often no longer update applications/libraries in previous releases.
The previous releases become progressively more out of date.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). 
> 

It may be wasteful to some extent but the advantage is that I can get a newer version of an application without being forced to update my OS. On my main Mac I now have an up to date MacTeX 2013 without having to upgrade to a newer version of the OS. TeXLive 2013 is not available in the official repository for Ubuntu 10.04 so you are forced to install/upgrade manually.

RStudio distributes all inclusive packages for several systems. You only have to install it and it works; no hassle with dependencies, out-of-date libraries etc. Very nice. It may be slightly wasteful but I can install it on OS X/Ubuntu 10.04/Kubuntu 12.04 (all virtual) without any kind of hassle or updating whatever in the system.

> 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.)
> 

It may be that they are better than they were several years ago but I don't really trust them either.
They tend to install far too much stuff that you don't always need (in my experience). And why duplicate what's working in the OS already?
And whenever I tried one of them I had (weird) issues/error messages. So now I prefer to stay away from them.
I don't want any package manager to mess with my current setup and force me to go through hoops to get the correct tools.

I use Simon's gcc/gfortran packages for compiling/testing/maintaining my R packages, for private programs and things like gawk, gnuplot and Octave.
In the current setup I get a working R and R-GUI. Can Macports, Fink and Homebrew create a working R-GUI with no issues?

I prefer the current setup. It works without ado thanks to Simon and suits me perfectly.

Berend

> -- 
> 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
> 
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