Please test R 4.0.0 pre-releases!

On Apr 1, 2020, at 09:30, Balamuta, James Joseph <balamut2 at illinois.edu> wrote:

Simon,

Thanks for the overview! A few quick questions:

1. Compiler-wise, the external clang compiler requirement was removed and, so, there is no guarantee of OpenMP on macOS again? 
2. Why was 10.13 chosen as the oldest system instead of 10.14 given the new push for increased security by Apple?
3. How likely is the oldest system requirement to be bumped in a patch release? 

Also, if you need help with mac-builder, Travis, or GitHub Actions, I'm more than happy to help! 

Best,

JJB

?On 3/31/20, 11:59 PM, "R-SIG-Mac on behalf of Simon Urbanek" <r-sig-mac-bounces at r-project.org on behalf of simon.urbanek at R-project.org> wrote:

   Dear Mac users,

   R 4.0.0 will be using an entirely new toolchain, entirely new build system on entirely new macOS version and hardware. Therefore I would like to ask you kindly to test the binaries from

   https://mac.R-project.org

   before the release as much as you can. Raising any issues after the release is too late! So please, please, test the pre-releases. Report any issues either directly to me or this mailing list.

   The nightly builds are signed, but not necessarily notarized. However, the build fulfils Apple's conditions and is known to pass notarization (in fact the the package available for download today is actually notarized) so it should be a good test for the release which will be notarized and should work on Catalina.

   For those that want to replicate our setup - technical details: we are now building with macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) as target (i.e. the oldest supported system), regular Apple Xcode/command line tools and GNU Fortran 8.2. R builds are running on macOS 10.15 (Catalina) with Xcode 11.4 using macOS 10.13 target. Packages are built on macOS 10.13 VMs with just Apple command line tools (this should make it easy to replicate the setup using Travis, for example). All 3rd party libraries that CRAN uses are available in http://mac.r-project.org/libs-4/

   The new R build system is in
   https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/QA/Simon/R4
   Packages build system has not changed and is in
   https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/QA/Simon/packages

   We also plan to have a mac-builder available with similar function as the win-builder where pre-submission tests can be performed and potentially a Travis template.

   Please test R pre-releases and provide feedback!

   Thanks,
   Simon