install.packages default type change?
The notion that "I doubt there are many R users on MacOS X who do not have the Developer Tools installed" is a problem in classroom settings, where you can fairly easily explain to students who use a Mac that they need to load X11, but having them also load XCode tools, and then have them deal with the g77/gfortran issues would likely be beyond most of them.
On 22-Jul-05, at 8:38 PM, Bill Northcott wrote:
On 22/07/2005, at 8:00 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
In the past, I believe that MacOS X users could use install.packages() successfully without any package 'type' specification, even though there is no .tgz file, but now it seems that they need to explicitly say: install.packages(..., type="source") Right? Is this a permanent change?
yes
Is this a permanent change?
FWIW: strictly speaking this is not a new change - the documentation was describing exactly this behavior for a while - it was merely a bug that the package installation implementation wasn't really following the documentation. The main reason for this behavior is that unlike other unix systems OS X comes by default without development tools, so you simply cannot use type="source". Therefore the default is to use binary packages which is the recommended way.
I am not sure this is a good decision. MacOS X is always supplied with the Xcode development tools, which is not true of all the UNIXen I have dealt with. It is really only Linux that I know to install developer tools as part of the default install and even then it is usually necessary to install header packages to actually build anything. Finally I doubt that there are many R users on MacOS X who do not have the Developer Tools installed, after all, they need X11 which is also an optional install. Indeed you supply g77 as part of the CRAN binary, and that is useless if you don't have the Developer Tools. Bill Northcott
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