On Sep 12, 2013, at 9:20 AM, Rainer M Krug <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi > > I am using R at the moment installed from the official installation as a > framework, buit I also installed it from homebrew. As I am not using the > Mac GUI (I am using mainly emacs, a little bit RStudio), so from there > there was no difference. > > So which approach has which advantages? I can think of advantages when > using homebrew (updates and upgrades of R) and also the framework > approach (Ease of maintenance). > > I personaly lean towards the homebrew installation (linux background), > but are there any disadvantages to using the official framework > installation? > > Any comments? > > Cheers, > > Rainer
Rainer, I have not used Homebrew. Having come to OSX 4+ years ago from Linux myself, I was comfortable using online third party Linux repos for things that were not in the default distribution. However, much like the early Fedora repos, before things were centralized and standardized, I found that the Mac repos (MacPorts and Fink) caused more trouble than they were worth. This was primarily due to non-standard dependencies, that installed all kinds of stuff that I really did not need or want and in some cases, conflicted with components that were already present in OSX. That was my common experience with MacPorts and I rapidly removed everything that they installed and just went to the upstream sources or binaries (when available) when I needed something. I can't say whether or not Homebrew has similar characteristics to MacPorts and/or Fink, but I would say, be very careful and know exactly what you are getting if you do. I used to build R from source on OSX, since I had done the same on Linux for years. However, for the past year or two now, I have been using Simon's CRAN binary releases and life has been much simplified as a result. Regards, Marc Schwartz _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
