[R-SIG-Mac] R vs. Microsoft R-Open updates?

[Simon Urbanek]

> On Jun 29, 2016, at 4:31 AM, cgw at witthoft.com wrote:
> 
>> On Jun 27, 2016, at 4:47 PM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Jun 26, 2016, at 5:40 PM, Carl Witthoft <carl at witthoft.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi.
>>> I D/L'd the 3.3.1 version of R for MacOSX and ran the installer. After getting some "can't load" error messages, I discovered that the installer had updated the MicrosoftROpen.app, not the "vanilla"  R.app . Is this expected behavior, or am I making a hash of my apps and libraries by trying to keep both R and MRO available on my (Yosemite) machine?
>> 
>> I don't know about MRO (sounds somewhat paradoxical ;)), but Apple Installer simply upgrades the application on your machine no matter where you moved it (whether you like it or not). If it really did upgrade your MRO app then it means Microsoft doesn't even bother changing the ID of the app which means they still claim it's our CRAN R which sounds really wrong given the name...
> 
> When you look at the MRO installation of R, the MRO.app looks just like
> your (and Stephan Iacus and the other contributors) R.app at least to my
> intermediate-level understanding of how to measure similarity. It
> includes citation of authorship but they did change the names of icons.
> The TO-DO list is identical. The png ions for history, prefs, quit, the
> NEWS text file, and many other items in the package contents are the
> same. This is a side by sided display of the Package Contents (converted
> to pdf):
> 
> It would be no surprise if two installations of the same version
> conflicted since they are using the same names for many modules and
> because Revo/MS says they will conflict, unless that is ... they were in
> different directories in the R.Framework tree, which is often the case
> with the MRO releases, since they generally lag behind by one major
> version level. My MRO version 3.2.2 has been working well alongside R
> version 3.3.0 and now 3.3.1. RSwitch.app seems to "switch" everything
> that is needful. 
> 
> -- 
> 
> The funny thing is that I ran the package installer for R 3.3.1 and it
> installed it into the MRO package folder.   If I dbl-click the MRO
> package icon, I get, so far as I can tell, the R3.3.1 engine and the
> usual packages, but  don't know how to tell whether I've simply
> clobbered MRO into nonexistence.
> 

Yes, Apple Installer will upgrade the app wherever it is. Since MS doesn't change the ID it pretends to be CRAN R.app so as far as OS X goes they are indistinguishable. Only MS can fix that problem by not re-using our ID for their binaries... I suspect that the same may be true for the framework (i.e. they may be using R Foundation ID there as well), but I didn't check.

Cheers,
Simon