On Martedì, giu 17, 2003, at 14:33 Europe/Rome, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 08:45 PM, Don MacQueen wrote:I completely agree with Simon, Jan, Thomas etc.
Specifically for X11, does it assume the user has separately installed Apple's X11 and QuartzWM, and if so, is it in any way dependent on anything unique to Apple's X11? That is, will it work if the user is using XFree86/XDarwin and some (any) other window >> manager?
The really native version doesn't really need to depend on X11 anymore since the use of X11 on Mac OS X was meant for applications that are not properly ported to OS X yet. Once Quartz and RAqua are complete there is no need for X11.
This means that all references to /sw in configure.ac can go.Do you mean that at some point in the future you intend that the configure.ac in the source distribution will remove all references to /sw? I'm not sure this is a good idea; I think I would prefer to have the option of building from sources using fink for those other things (readline, jpeg, png, tetex, etc) if I want to. Otherwise I have to learn how to get them from several other sites, increasing my system maintenance load and making it harder to keep them up to date.
Can you give specific and substantive reasons why fink should be avoided?
Jan already listed the main technical reasons why it is indeed a very good idea. Apart from that, fink is not an official package and was only meant as a temporary solution for people who need a (no matter how ugly) way to run existing unix programs on OS X. Hardly any real OS X user has installed fink (especially since Jaguar is out). Fink was great during the first couple of months when native OS X ports were hardly existent, but is now obsolete for mainstream OS X use.
I get the impression that R for OS X is being moved away from being another unix R variant (in the sense that Solaris, various Linuxes, SGI, etc. are unix variants), and moved toward being a specialized platform-specific version. Assuming my impression is more or less correct, I'd like to understand the pros and cons of this move.
It is not a "move" of R. Mac OS X is simply not "another unix variant". Darwin is indeed, but Mac OS X is not. You can compile X11 for Darwin and use it exactly the way you can use Linux on a PPC hardware. But Mac OS X has many very nice (often proprietary) layers that are important to the Mac users, but that part of OS X is not "unix". The goal here is to release R which fits in the philosophy of the system - ease of use, good integration with the existing frameworks, appealing design. These are not properties of unix, but of OS X. So what we need is in fact Mac-OS-X-like look and feel. The fact that OS X is unix-based helps with respect to the R engine itself - we need no special ports of packages anymore, but it has a totally different GUI.
Fortunately R makes a distinction between GUI and the engine, therefore we can create a real OS X GUI without affecting other platforms - including Darwin ;). "Unix" users are used to compile their own software, therefore moving fink support to the category 'optional' is only logical, since you can still easily enable it with configure parameters and/or environment settings. Real Mac OS X users are used to nice, binary distributions, therefore we cannot assume fink and we need Quartz device and RAqua. It will be a big help for most OS X users. (BTW: no Mac users I know (non-developers) have installed X11.)
Therefore the recent changes are IMHO really important from Mac OS X user's view - so far most binaries were rather experimental and assumed some unix knowledge (note: there was is no official OS X binary!). It was ok to use fink for those as a temporary solution, but the official binary cannot rely on unsupported non-Apple packages. The only thing external part we really need is libdl and I'm sure we can supply it simply with R - such as pcre etc., all other libraries are optional.
About libdl: in fact there is no need to link against it and I'll try to integrate it in the R sources.
stefano
Cheers,
Simon
--- Simon Urbanek Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis University of Augsburg Universitätsstr. 14 86135 Augsburg Germany
Tel: +49-821-598-2236 Fax: +49-821-598-2200
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