[R-SIG-Mac] XQuartz now supports Apple Silicon

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 30/01/2021 09:46, Bob Rudis wrote:
> Announcement and d/l links:
> 
> — https://www.mail-archive.com/xquartz-dev@lists.macosforge.org/msg01027.html
> — https://www.xquartz.org/releases/XQuartz-2.8.0_beta1.html
> 
> Folks who use it should get prompted to install it next time you open it.

And now beta3 which I did get nagged to install (even though it is a 
beta and I have not selected beta updates, and unlike beta1).

There is a problem with these betas - they do not contain cairo.  The 
R-admin instructions assumed that XQuartz did (as it has ever since R 
started making use of cairo) and I have just revised them to take that 
into account.  AFAICS the binary distribution of R is statically linked 
to cairo, but it is dynamically linked to X11 libs, which look 
compatible enough.  Nevertheless, using XQuartz betas with binary R 
4.0.x distributions is uncharted territory.

As the betas install into /opt/X11 on top of version 2.7.11, only people 
installing from scratch will notice that cairo is missing.

I have managed to build R with full cairo support on arm64, but only by 
building cairo from source (neither mac.r-project.org/libs-arm64 nor 
homebrew have cairo-xlib) and using fontconfig 2.13.93 not 2.13.1.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley using stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford