[R-SIG-Mac] Generating R .pkg file for Mac Distribution

[Simon Urbanek]

Just for posterity - please note that the installer referenced below is potentially unsafe and dangerous, because it does NOT actually package the binary but rather contains just an arbitrary shell script and thus you cannot be sure that you get the official binaries or something malicious instead (and it is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks). Also it performs various actions as root that you may or may not like. Be careful trusting installers that are not signed by CRAN members. We only supply the binary and any post-install actions only affect the installed binary not other system functions nor user directories.

Cheers,
Simon



> On May 17, 2018, at 3:15 PM, Balamuta, James Joseph <balamut2 using illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
> Greetings and Salutations Nigel,
> 
> I've "augmented" the base R install via an unofficial, e.g. not sanctioned by CRAN, Rtools build. This can be found here:
> 
> https://github.com/coatless/r-macos-rtools
> 
> Presently, the latest release only supports the R 3.4.* line:
> 
> https://github.com/coatless/r-macos-rtools/releases/tag/v1.0.0
> 
> I'll likely update it this weekend to provide support for R 3.5.*. In particular, I'll bump the compiler from clang4 to clang6.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> JJB
> 
> On 5/17/18, 11:45 AM, "R-SIG-Mac on behalf of Nigel Delaney" <r-sig-mac-bounces using r-project.org on behalf of nigelfdelaney using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>    Thanks for the responses so far.
> 
>    David - indeed those instructions are up to date, but people are
>    struggling with the issue and unable to fix that (and keep trying to
>    install from source).
> 
>    Chuck - Thanks also for the suggestion, it's a good idea.  I'm hoping
>    we might be able to have a one step installation to keep things simple
>    though.
> 
>    Cheers,
>    Nigel
> 
>    On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 9:39 AM, Berry, Charles <ccberry using ucsd.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On May 16, 2018, at 11:40 AM, Nigel Delaney <nigelfdelaney using gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Mac binaries on R are distributed as .pkg files available from CRAN
>>> for installation.  Does anyone know if the source script (assuming a
>>> script is used) that generates this pkg file is available anywhere?
>>> The pkg seems to contain a few elements like a postflight/postinstall
>>> script that I could not find in any open source repository and are not
>>> part of the R binaries.
>>> 
>>> We have a few users who are dealing with the fortran compiler issues
>>> on Mac, and were hoping to just modify the current .pkg to contain a
>>> few more packages, was hoping to avoid reinventing the wheel on the
>>> packaging scripts.
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Why not just provide those users with the binaries for those packages?
>> 
>> If there are more than a few users and/or more than a few packages that need this treatment, set up your own repository and put the binaries there. See:
>> 
>> https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-admin.html#Setting-up-a-package-repository
>> 
>> HTH,
>> 
>> Chuck
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
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