For posterity, this thread was continued on the R-SIG-Mac mailing list under the same subject. Prof. Brian Ripley was kind enough to point out an easy work around:
R CMD INSTALL now uses the internal untar() in package utils: this ensures that all platforms can install bzip2- and xz-compressed tarballs. In case this causes problems (as it has on some Windows file systems when run from Cygwin tools) it can be overridden by the environment variable R_INSTALL_TAR: setting this to a modern external tar program will speed up unpacking of large (tens of Mb or more) tarballs. I suspect that the origin of the non-standard tar block types was that user accounts and groups on my Mac are managed by Active Directory. The same commands work on another Snow Leopard Mac with locally managed accounts. -chris ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
