Skip to content

R 4.0 toolchain

1 message · Patrick Schratz

#
Thanks Simon.
Branching off here to discuss the toolchain in general.
I see the danger posting not 100% correct scripts and in blog posts in general because they might get outdated and not always reflect the official documentation.
On the other side: What is the middle way? Arguably installing a robust toolchain (on Catalina especially but for macOS in general) is not just done with the installation of the signed package.
Most normal users are not aware about all the little specialties on macOS (missing openMP enabled compiler, SDK issues) and why adjustments might be needed.

Even though the idea is to require as less manual configuration as possible, this is not always practical in the end (unless all maintainers agree on configuring their package without the need of an openMP enabled C compiler for example).
And I also think that ?installing from source? is not a dev-only thing.

1. By using the Apple internal clang as the default, will maintainers be indirectly forced to remove the dependency on an openMP enabled compiler with respect to getting source installations on macOS working?
2. Can there be an official section easily accessible for users which recommends which compiler to use (and how to set the Makevars) if users really need/want to do so?
    a. Regarding openMP enabled compilers: llvm is probably the one with the least differences to Apples clang. It can be installed via brew (brew install llvm) and then linked in Makevars. Would that be an alternative?
3. SDK: I did not wanted to induce that setting the SDK vars is needed for the CRAN build chain (maybe we got each other wrong here). However, as of now, there are real issues with SDK 10.15 that result in errors that are really hard to track down or even fall under the radar when testing (if someone does not run Catalina). Therefore I am linking locally against SDK 10.13 since some days and that resolved many issues (see again the Rcpp issue and the igraph issue). Since Catalina is the latest release and many people run it there should be test/instructions somewhere on mac.rproject that deal with this/suggest not to use SDK 10.15 for R IMO. Maybe this issue deserves a special thread.


Cheers, Patrick
On 1. Apr 2020, 22:29 +0200, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek at r-project.org>, wrote: