[R-SIG-Mac] R.app fails to run under non-Sierra OSX versions

[Simon Urbanek]

Thomas,


> On Apr 12, 2017, at 4:30 AM, Thomas Obadia <thomas.obadia at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear R team,
> 
> I've recently come across a strange bug which seems undocumented and
> contradicts the INSTALL instructions from the sources of R-GUI.
> 
> Running El Capitan, I usually install all my distributions using Homebrew
> and keep everything up-to-date (except for the OS which is not Sierra yet).
> The current R.app 1.6.8 fails to run on El Capitan, with a warning "You're
> running 10.11.6. This app requires 10.12".
> 
> My first thought was a Homebrew mix-up in the binary distribution, but the
> Github issue pointed to somthing else (see:
> https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-science/issues/5411#issuecomment-293030482).
> The binary they build is using -target R -configuration Release
> 
> The install instructions from Mac-GUI-1.68.tar.gz seem to be out of date as
> they still detail SnowLeopard64 build which seem not included anymore. Is
> there any reason why a normal build of R.app would not run on OSX versions
> other than Sierra ?
> 

No, it's entirely up to your Xcode setup - Xcode alone determines the target macOS version. As you will see our CRAN binaries work just fine on El Capitan (where they are built). In fact, the Release target simply uses whatever SDK your Xcode provides - it can be anything as old as 10.6, there is not restriction on the macOS version in the sources. So if you use 10.12 SDK the target will be Sierra, if you use 10.6 SDK the target will be Snow Leopard etc. - for CRAN we use 10.11 SDK to target El Capitan.

Cheers,
Simon



> All the best,
> Thomas
> 
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> 
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