Choosing between Snow Leopard and Mavericks builds

On 31/05/2014 16:14, Gow, Ian wrote:

Also, instructions here <http://r.research.att.com/libs/> complement the
manual (if you are---as I was---unsure what to do with the file you get
from the link in the instructions
<http://r.research.att.com/libs/gfortran-4.8.2-darwin13.tar.bz2>).

But the current manuals give more details ... footnote 44 says

This is a tarball which needs to be unpacked in the Terminal by e.g.
sudo tar -zxf gfortran-4.8.2-darwin13.tar.bz2 -C /.

On 2014-05-31, 11:10 AM, "Brian Ripley" <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

On 31 May 2014, at 16:00, Davood Tofighi <dtofighi at gmail.com> wrote:

I have a follow up question. How can I install gfortran-4.8.2 on the
Mavericks?

See the manual: link below.

On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 3:04:27 AM UTC-4, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
I've noticed some confusion about which CRAN installer package to
use,
and even reluctance to update to 3.1.0.  So some pointers for
Mavericks
users

1) AFAIK no users are going to be worse off using the Snow Leopard
build
of 3.1.0 rather than the only (Snow Leopard) build of 3.0.x.

2) The Mavericks build has support for C++11-using packages (there
are
currently less than a handful) and some performance improvements from
its later compilers (and in rare cases these are large).

3) If you rely on binary packages with are not available for the
Mavericks build, install the Snow Leopard one.  Currently that
includes
CRAN packages rgdal and rjags and all the BioC packages.

4) If you install packages from source, you will be most likely
better
off with the Mavericks build.

5) The two builds need different Fortran compilers installed: you can
have both compilers at once.  The details are at
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-admin.html#OS-X .
As
far as I know a Fortran compiler is only needed if you install
packages
from sources.

Some of the Mavericks binary packages are missing for good reason.
The
C++ binary interface for the Xcode 5.x compilers in Mavericks is
completely different, so external software has to be compiled with
those
compilers.  This affects CRAN packages

RQuantlib RProtoBuf RVowalWabbit rgdal rjags rzmq

Most of these can be gotten to work (see the results labelled
r-devel-osx-x86_64-clang at
http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary.html) if compiling
from sources.  There are packages with badly-written C++ which do not
compile under Mavericks, but as we have been chasing the CRAN
maintainers for a few months there are very few left (the main
example
is BioC's package mzR).

We had expected that by this time Mavericks users would be in a
majority, but it seems the proportion is in the 40s (%).  Thus for R
3.1.0 most of the effort has gone into the Snow Leopard build: expect
that to change by R 3.2.0 in a year's time.

--
Brian D. Ripley,                  rip... at 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

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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