R version on gifi
On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 05:11 PM, Don MacQueen wrote:
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.
Except for one major flaw in Aqua--the absence of "focus follows mouse", as it is sometimes called in an X
Yes, this is indeed a very nice feature (I've been using it on unix all time), but it can be disastrous at the same time. MS Windows has an undocumented registry key which allows you to enable this, but once you do that you'll realize that a lot of applications assume 'topmost-has-focus' state and are almost unusable if the 'focus-follows-mouse' is enabled (example: if you have a mouse over a toolbar your document window is inactive - most applications can't deal with that). I'm not sure about this in OS X (since we can't really test it ;P), but something similar might happen.
It's a documented part of TweakUI, and I find it very usable. After all, it I have my mouse over something on the toolbar, I have deliberately moved focus there (just as in CDE), and it is very natural to someone used to this from a good Unix windows manager. Only a very few applications cause me problems (most notably the Visual Basic IDE).
Jan cited "Gerben Wierda's i-installer" as a source for jpeg, png, and teTex. This source is somehow more "official" than fink? But, considering what Jan says, i.e. "everything needed in /usr/local will" be included with the installer package, it doesn't matter to the end user.
Exactly, that's the point :) We don't want to assume things that are non-standard. We should provide them if necessary. There is still one issue to consider in this context: source packages. A really 'plain' Mac OS X can't be used to install source packages as-is, basically because there are three missing things: Dev Tools, g77 and latex. The first one is official, so we could require that (and probably have to). G77 is really just a few files, so the installer could add it if necessary, but I'm not sure about latex. Is building packages w/o latex documentation an option?
It could be. Checking them is not, though.
The direct use of source packages seems to me as the greatest benefit of OSX being unix-based, therefore i wouldn't like to miss it, even if I was pure Mac user...
At DSC we seemed to decide that we would need a binary packages mechanism for the GUI MacOS X port. I suspect you underestimate the difficulties (or overestimate the abilities of the users concerned): the Windows experience is that is hard to overestimate the ability of the users to make stupid errors and not realize what. As for this being `just another unix version': if only! Simple things on any other unix-alike like making a Rlapack dynamic library became major headaches on darwin, only, and that is still not fully resolved.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595