On Sep 12, 2013, at 9:20 AM, Rainer M Krug <Rainer at krugs.de> 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.