Package distribution for Macintosh R

That would be nice, no more binaries. In fact, I stopped building
them, telling everybody to use fink, but it seems very few people
actually listened. And using the fink version of R is less flexible,
of course. Other problems with no-binaries:

-- typical Macintosh users are proud to stay away from the command line
-- more is needed than the Apple Development tools (i.e.
     from fink we need dlcompat, X11, gnome perhaps)
-- the Apple DevTools are changing rapidly and have various
     incompatibilities (the December 2001 tools, the April 2002
     tools, the Jaguar Tools)
-- as a consequence the developer must choose between
     various versions of gcc and g77 or f2c
--  does the typical user know about ATLAS ? Another choice.
-- no-more-binaries implies that the typical R user has the 
     DevTools installed (and maintains a personal version of
     fink)
-- it seems to me that for other Unixes R and its packages are
    also distributed as binaries (for the same reason). Every Unix
    distribution must provide binaries of the recommended
    packages
-- packages in the Carbon version  are binaries because the
     typical R user does not know (and probably cannot be
     asked to know) how to build shared libraries on the OS 9
     platform. tools (MPW, CodeWarrior) are readily available.
-- many of the packages depend on other libraries (netpbm,
     hdf5, MySQL, MPI, PVM, and so on) being present. Again, often
    fink comes to the rescue, but the user needs to maintain all this in
     fink
-- building some of the OmegaHat packages is far from
     easy, and can perhaps never be made easy
-- the Darwin/X11 distribution is already like all other
     Unix distributions, except that I provide a ridiculous
     number of binaries
-- next week I will have OS X installer packages for the
     whole thing, and users only need to know how to
     double=click, and only have to deal with a single
     installer file.
-- with the Quartz device and the Cocoa interfaces things
     will become easier for the user, but harder for the developer
     (need to know more stuff, need to have more stuff)

Now eventually the DevTools and OS X itself will stabilize, and
the various configure problems will be worked out (currently,
ATLAS does not build properly with the April tools and gcc2 with
its g77, and R does not build with gcc3 and its g77). Then
things will become much easier, and many more people will
roll their own. Especially when they are happy with X11 and
the command line. And that's good, because making your own
provides a better understanding of the whole environment and
allows you to optimize towards your own machine and your own
needs.

Package distribution for Macintosh R

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