Pretty soon, hopefully, the RAqua version will make the Darwin/X11
version unnecessary. In the meantime, for convergence, I'll modify the
Gifi
version in various ways.
-- It's 1.7.1
-- It no longer supports gnome
-- It still uses Tcl/Tk for X11 (using 8.5 from CVS)
!! It no longer uses anything from fink (readline and dlcompat
as on Stefano's site, jpeg and png and teTeX from Gerben Wierda's
i-installer, Tcl/Tk from cvs, X11 from Apple)
-- the package installer will put everything in /usr/local
This means that all references to /sw in configure.ac can go. This
next distribution will appear probably on wednesday. Undoubtedly
some packages will break, because they still use stuff from /sw,
but I'll fix those as we go along.
===
Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics;
Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical
Software
US mail: 9432 Boelter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554
phone (310)-825-9550; fax (310)-206-5658; email: deleeuw@stat.ucla.edu
homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------
No matter where you go, there you are. --- Buckaroo Banzai
http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu/sounds/nomatter.au
R version on gifi
12 messages · Jan de Leeuw, Thomas Lumley, A.J. Rossini +3 more
Couple of questions... Thanks -Don
At 10:00 AM -0700 6/16/03, Jan de Leeuw wrote:
Pretty soon, hopefully, the RAqua version will make the Darwin/X11
version unnecessary. In the meantime, for convergence, I'll modify the Gifi
version in various ways.
-- It's 1.7.1
-- It no longer supports gnome
-- It still uses Tcl/Tk for X11 (using 8.5 from CVS)
!! It no longer uses anything from fink (readline and dlcompat
as on Stefano's site, jpeg and png and teTeX from Gerben Wierda's
i-installer, Tcl/Tk from cvs, X11 from Apple)
Is the user expected to have separately installed any or all of these various libraries, or are they included in the R distribution and installed by the R installer? Or what? Specifically for X11, does it assume the user has separately installed Apple's X11 and QuartzWM, and if so, is it in any way dependent on anything unique to Apple's X11? That is, will it work if the user is using XFree86/XDarwin and some (any) other window manager?
-- the package installer will put everything in /usr/local This means that all references to /sw in configure.ac can go.
Do you mean that at some point in the future you intend that the configure.ac in the source distribution will remove all references to /sw? I'm not sure this is a good idea; I think I would prefer to have the option of building from sources using fink for those other things (readline, jpeg, png, tetex, etc) if I want to. Otherwise I have to learn how to get them from several other sites, increasing my system maintenance load and making it harder to keep them up to date. Can you give specific and substantive reasons why fink should be avoided? I get the impression that R for OS X is being moved away from being another unix R variant (in the sense that Solaris, various Linuxes, SGI, etc. are unix variants), and moved toward being a specialized platform-specific version. Assuming my impression is more or less correct, I'd like to understand the pros and cons of this move.
This next distribution will appear probably on wednesday. Undoubtedly some packages will break, because they still use stuff from /sw, but I'll fix those as we go along. === Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics; Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical Software US mail: 9432 Boelter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554 phone (310)-825-9550; fax (310)-206-5658; email: deleeuw@stat.ucla.edu homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu
-------------------------------------- Don MacQueen Environmental Protection Department Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore, CA, USA
On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Don MacQueen wrote:
Can you give specific and substantive reasons why fink should be avoided? I get the impression that R for OS X is being moved away from being another unix R variant (in the sense that Solaris, various Linuxes, SGI, etc. are unix variants), and moved toward being a specialized platform-specific version. Assuming my impression is more or less correct, I'd like to understand the pros and cons of this move.
I think the move is to stop *assuming* fink, not to forbid it. There are at least two goals 1. To produce a binary OS X distribution for people who don't want to learn Unix, including an (optional) GUI and an (optional) quartz() device driver. If you want to stick with a command line and x11(), you're welcome to. If you want to compile from sources yourself you can competely ignore the binary distribution. This binary can't install anything in /sw (because that would clobber fink) and doesn't want to assume that anything is already there. 2. To produce a simple minimal set of instructions and dependencies for compiling R on Mac OS X. A set of instructions that includes installing fink is (I fervently hope) not minimal. Of course, if you already have fink installed you can easily use it to get all the necessary software. You might in future have to specify a configure option to get configure to look in /sw for system libraries, but this makes it more similar to other Unices, not less similar. -thomas
Standard Apple stuff (such as anything in /usr, including X11) will not be included in the installer package, but everything needed in /usr/local will I assume it will work with XFree86/XDarwin and with OroborosX, but I am not going to test it with those, because I don't use them anymore. I am sure that if more people want /sw, then it will just stay in. I am just saying that as far as my distribution (and Stefano's) are concerned it is not needed any more. Of course you can always use it if you want to by setting LDFLAGS. I try to avoid fink because it is a maze of nasty dependencies between packages, which we do not need for R. It is also very inconvenient and potentially disastrous to have duplicates of binaries and dynamic libs in /sw and /usr/local and /usr. For instance, when Apple added ncurses, many things went wrong. Fink is getting more and more system-foo packages to deal with cases in which there are alternative installs, and this will obviously become worse over time as more and more gets added to Darwin. So (a) from the point of view of R fink is overkill, and (b) fink has been great to have around for three years but it is reaching the end of its usefulness period. Only my opinion, of course. Your impression that R is moved away from "just another Unix variant" is correct only insofar as RAqua is being added as another GUI. All the other GUIs (Terminal, Tcl/Tk, XTerm) remain available, and for those savvy enough to build R fink and gnome can still be used. There will just be no binaries. --- Jan
On Monday, Jun 16, 2003, at 11:45 US/Pacific, Don MacQueen wrote:
Couple of questions... Thanks -Don At 10:00 AM -0700 6/16/03, Jan de Leeuw wrote:
Pretty soon, hopefully, the RAqua version will make the Darwin/X11
version unnecessary. In the meantime, for convergence, I'll modify
the Gifi
version in various ways.
-- It's 1.7.1
-- It no longer supports gnome
-- It still uses Tcl/Tk for X11 (using 8.5 from CVS)
!! It no longer uses anything from fink (readline and dlcompat
as on Stefano's site, jpeg and png and teTeX from Gerben Wierda's
i-installer, Tcl/Tk from cvs, X11 from Apple)
Is the user expected to have separately installed any or all of these various libraries, or are they included in the R distribution and installed by the R installer? Or what? Specifically for X11, does it assume the user has separately installed Apple's X11 and QuartzWM, and if so, is it in any way dependent on anything unique to Apple's X11? That is, will it work if the user is using XFree86/XDarwin and some (any) other window manager?
-- the package installer will put everything in /usr/local This means that all references to /sw in configure.ac can go.
Do you mean that at some point in the future you intend that the configure.ac in the source distribution will remove all references to /sw? I'm not sure this is a good idea; I think I would prefer to have the option of building from sources using fink for those other things (readline, jpeg, png, tetex, etc) if I want to. Otherwise I have to learn how to get them from several other sites, increasing my system maintenance load and making it harder to keep them up to date. Can you give specific and substantive reasons why fink should be avoided? I get the impression that R for OS X is being moved away from being another unix R variant (in the sense that Solaris, various Linuxes, SGI, etc. are unix variants), and moved toward being a specialized platform-specific version. Assuming my impression is more or less correct, I'd like to understand the pros and cons of this move.
This next distribution will appear probably on wednesday. Undoubtedly some packages will break, because they still use stuff from /sw, but I'll fix those as we go along. === Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics; Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical Software US mail: 9432 Boelter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554 phone (310)-825-9550; fax (310)-206-5658; email: deleeuw@stat.ucla.edu homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu
-- -------------------------------------- Don MacQueen Environmental Protection Department Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore, CA, USA --------------------------------------
=== Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics; Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical Software US mail: 9432 Boelter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554 phone (310)-825-9550; fax (310)-206-5658; email: deleeuw@stat.ucla.edu homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------- No matter where you go, there you are. --- Buckaroo Banzai http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu/sounds/nomatter.au
On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 08:45 PM, Don MacQueen wrote:
Specifically for X11, does it assume the user has separately installed Apple's X11 and QuartzWM, and if so, is it in any way dependent on anything unique to Apple's X11? That is, will it work if the user is using XFree86/XDarwin and some (any) other window manager?
The really native version doesn't really need to depend on X11 anymore since the use of X11 on Mac OS X was meant for applications that are not properly ported to OS X yet. Once Quartz and RAqua are complete there is no need for X11.
This means that all references to /sw in configure.ac can go.
Do you mean that at some point in the future you intend that the configure.ac in the source distribution will remove all references to /sw? I'm not sure this is a good idea; I think I would prefer to have the option of building from sources using fink for those other things (readline, jpeg, png, tetex, etc) if I want to. Otherwise I have to learn how to get them from several other sites, increasing my system maintenance load and making it harder to keep them up to date. Can you give specific and substantive reasons why fink should be avoided?
Jan already listed the main technical reasons why it is indeed a very good idea. Apart from that, fink is not an official package and was only meant as a temporary solution for people who need a (no matter how ugly) way to run existing unix programs on OS X. Hardly any real OS X user has installed fink (especially since Jaguar is out). Fink was great during the first couple of months when native OS X ports were hardly existent, but is now obsolete for mainstream OS X use.
I get the impression that R for OS X is being moved away from being another unix R variant (in the sense that Solaris, various Linuxes, SGI, etc. are unix variants), and moved toward being a specialized platform-specific version. Assuming my impression is more or less correct, I'd like to understand the pros and cons of this move.
It is not a "move" of R. Mac OS X is simply not "another unix variant". Darwin is indeed, but Mac OS X is not. You can compile X11 for Darwin and use it exactly the way you can use Linux on a PPC hardware. But Mac OS X has many very nice (often proprietary) layers that are important to the Mac users, but that part of OS X is not "unix". The goal here is to release R which fits in the philosophy of the system - ease of use, good integration with the existing frameworks, appealing design. These are not properties of unix, but of OS X. So what we need is in fact Mac-OS-X-like look and feel. The fact that OS X is unix-based helps with respect to the R engine itself - we need no special ports of packages anymore, but it has a totally different GUI. Fortunately R makes a distinction between GUI and the engine, therefore we can create a real OS X GUI without affecting other platforms - including Darwin ;). "Unix" users are used to compile their own software, therefore moving fink support to the category 'optional' is only logical, since you can still easily enable it with configure parameters and/or environment settings. Real Mac OS X users are used to nice, binary distributions, therefore we cannot assume fink and we need Quartz device and RAqua. It will be a big help for most OS X users. (BTW: no Mac users I know (non-developers) have installed X11.) Therefore the recent changes are IMHO really important from Mac OS X user's view - so far most binaries were rather experimental and assumed some unix knowledge (note: there was is no official OS X binary!). It was ok to use fink for those as a temporary solution, but the official binary cannot rely on unsupported non-Apple packages. The only thing external part we really need is libdl and I'm sure we can supply it simply with R - such as pcre etc., all other libraries are optional. Cheers, Simon --- Simon Urbanek Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis University of Augsburg Universit?tsstr. 14 86135 Augsburg Germany Tel: +49-821-598-2236 Fax: +49-821-598-2200 Simon.Urbanek@Math.Uni-Augsburg.de http://simon.urbanek.info
Simon Urbanek <Simon.Urbanek@math.uni-augsburg.de> writes:
On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 08:45 PM, Don MacQueen wrote:
Can you give specific and substantive reasons why fink should be avoided?
Jan already listed the main technical reasons why it is indeed a very good idea. Apart from that, fink is not an official package and was only meant as a temporary solution for people who need a (no matter how ugly) way to run existing unix programs on OS X. Hardly any real OS X user has installed fink (especially since Jaguar is out). Fink was great during the first couple of months when native OS X ports were hardly existent, but is now obsolete for mainstream OS X use.
I think completely agree with Simon here. MacOSX is great for folks that like the good things in life, but for chumps who just want a Unix variant, run a PPC Unix (linux or *bsd or the like). There are just enough differences to create user-interface stress, depending on the particular system configuration... (of course, I'm one of those who has been using a unix variant for almost 20 years now, and with the onset of senility, that isn't going to change). best, -tony
A.J. Rossini / rossini@u.washington.edu / rossini@scharp.org http://software.biostat.washington.edu/ UNTIL IT MOVES IN JULY. Biomedical and Health Informatics, University of Washington Biostatistics, HVTN/SCHARP, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center FHCRC: 206-667-7025 (fax=4812)|Voicemail is pretty sketchy/use Email CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail message and any attachments ... {{dropped}}
I appreciate the extra explanations from Simon, Jan, Thomas, and Tony. All in all, after having read what you all have to say, the things that I found potentially alarming in Jan's message yesterday are not so alarming anymore. -Don
At 2:33 PM +0200 6/17/03, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 08:45 PM, Don MacQueen wrote:
Specifically for X11, does it assume the user has separately installed Apple's X11 and QuartzWM, and if so, is it in any way dependent on anything unique to Apple's X11? That is, will it work if the user is using XFree86/XDarwin and some (any) other window manager?
The really native version doesn't really need to depend on X11 anymore since the use of X11 on Mac OS X was meant for applications that are not properly ported to OS X yet. Once Quartz and RAqua are complete there is no need for X11.
Except for one major flaw in Aqua--the absence of "focus follows mouse", as it is sometimes called in an X Windows context. I consider the absence a flaw because I find it incredibly useful to be able to type R commands into a window that is partially covered by another (usually graphics device) window. This is, of course, a (strongly held) personal preference, and I'm well aware that many do not consider this to be an issue. The Mac OS has always had this limitation, and probably always will, so there's nothing to be done about it. More generally, having RAqua, a version of R that is as "Mac-like" as possible, is a good thing; I have co-workers who are more likely to use such a version of R. As someone who likes OS X a lot, I like anything that promotes it, and a good R gui will do that around here.
This means that all references to /sw in configure.ac can go.
Do you mean that at some point in the future you intend that the configure.ac in the source distribution will remove all references to /sw? I'm not sure this is a good idea; I think I would prefer to have the option of building from sources using fink for those other things (readline, jpeg, png, tetex, etc) if I want to. Otherwise I have to learn how to get them from several other sites, increasing my system maintenance load and making it harder to keep them up to date. Can you give specific and substantive reasons why fink should be avoided?
Jan already listed the main technical reasons why it is indeed a very good idea. Apart from that, fink is not an official package and was only meant as a temporary solution for people who need a (no matter how ugly) way to run existing unix programs on OS X.
Jan cited "Gerben Wierda's i-installer" as a source for jpeg, png, and teTex. This source is somehow more "official" than fink? But, considering what Jan says, i.e. "everything needed in /usr/local will" be included with the installer package, it doesn't matter to the end user.
Hardly any real OS X user has installed fink (especially since Jaguar is out). Fink was great during the first couple of months when native OS X ports were hardly existent, but is now obsolete for mainstream OS X use.
I get the impression that R for OS X is being moved away from being another unix R variant (in the sense that Solaris, various Linuxes, SGI, etc. are unix variants), and moved toward being a specialized platform-specific version. Assuming my impression is more or less correct, I'd like to understand the pros and cons of this move.
It is not a "move" of R. Mac OS X is simply not "another unix variant". Darwin is indeed, but Mac OS X is not. You can compile X11 for Darwin and use it exactly the way you can use Linux on a PPC hardware. But Mac OS X has many very nice (often proprietary) layers that are important to the Mac users, but that part of OS X is not "unix". The goal here is to release R which fits in the philosophy of the system - ease of use, good integration with the existing frameworks, appealing design. These are not properties of unix, but of OS X. So what we need is in fact Mac-OS-X-like look and feel. The fact that OS X is unix-based helps with respect to the R engine itself - we need no special ports of packages anymore, but it has a totally different GUI. Fortunately R makes a distinction between GUI and the engine, therefore we can create a real OS X GUI without affecting other platforms - including Darwin ;). "Unix" users are used to compile their own software, therefore moving fink support to the category 'optional' is only logical, since you can still easily enable it with configure parameters and/or environment settings.
I'm glad to hear that, but when Jan says "all references to /sw in configure.ac can go" I do tend to wonder whether that is actually the case.
Real Mac OS X users are used to nice, binary distributions, therefore we cannot assume fink and we need Quartz device and RAqua. It will be a big help for most OS X users. (BTW: no Mac users I know (non-developers) have installed X11.)
I subscribe to Apples "scitech" mailing list, for people interested in using the Mac in scientific applications. I'd say X windows is pretty common among those folks. Don't know how many of them would consider themselves "developers."
Therefore the recent changes are IMHO really important from Mac OS X user's view - so far most binaries were rather experimental and assumed some unix knowledge (note: there was is no official OS X binary!). It was ok to use fink for those as a temporary solution, but the official binary cannot rely on unsupported non-Apple packages. The only thing external part we really need is libdl and I'm sure we can supply it simply with R - such as pcre etc., all other libraries are optional. Cheers, Simon --- Simon Urbanek Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis University of Augsburg Universit?tsstr. 14 86135 Augsburg Germany Tel: +49-821-598-2236 Fax: +49-821-598-2200 Simon.Urbanek@Math.Uni-Augsburg.de http://simon.urbanek.info
-------------------------------------- Don MacQueen Environmental Protection Department Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore, CA, USA
At 6:27 AM -0700 6/17/03, A.J. Rossini wrote:
Simon Urbanek <Simon.Urbanek@math.uni-augsburg.de> writes:
On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 08:45 PM, Don MacQueen wrote:
Can you give specific and substantive reasons why fink should be avoided?
Jan already listed the main technical reasons why it is indeed a very good idea. Apart from that, fink is not an official package and was only meant as a temporary solution for people who need a (no matter how ugly) way to run existing unix programs on OS X. Hardly any real OS X user has installed fink (especially since Jaguar is out). Fink was great during the first couple of months when native OS X ports were hardly existent, but is now obsolete for mainstream OS X use.
I think completely agree with Simon here. MacOSX is great for folks that like the good things in life, but for chumps who just want a Unix variant, run a PPC Unix (linux or *bsd or the like). There are just enough differences to create user-interface stress, depending on the particular system configuration...
Then there are those of us who "want it all", by which I mean both the goodness of native OS X (desktop apps and all), and _also_ the unix side, in a single box.
(of course, I'm one of those who has been using a unix variant for almost 20 years now, and with the onset of senility, that isn't going to change).
Make it 15 years for me...
best, -tony -- A.J. Rossini / rossini@u.washington.edu / rossini@scharp.org http://software.biostat.washington.edu/ UNTIL IT MOVES IN JULY. Biomedical and Health Informatics, University of Washington Biostatistics, HVTN/SCHARP, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center FHCRC: 206-667-7025 (fax=4812)|Voicemail is pretty sketchy/use Email CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail message and any attachments may be confidential and privileged. If you received this message in error, please destroy it and notify the sender. Thank you.
-------------------------------------- Don MacQueen Environmental Protection Department Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore, CA, USA
For the chumps: If you just want a Unix variant, run Darwin. If you just want a Linux variant, run PPC Linux.
On Tuesday, Jun 17, 2003, at 06:27 US/Pacific, A.J. Rossini wrote:
I think completely agree with Simon here. MacOSX is great for folks that like the good things in life, but for chumps who just want a Unix variant, run a PPC Unix (linux or *bsd or the like). There are just enough differences to create user-interface stress, depending on the particular system configuration...
=== Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics; Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical Software US mail: 9432 Boelter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554 phone (310)-825-9550; fax (310)-206-5658; email: deleeuw@stat.ucla.edu homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------- No matter where you go, there you are. --- Buckaroo Banzai http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu/sounds/nomatter.au
On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 05:11 PM, Don MacQueen wrote:
The really native version doesn't really need to depend on X11 anymore since the use of X11 on Mac OS X was meant for applications that are not properly ported to OS X yet. Once Quartz and RAqua are complete there is no need for X11.
Except for one major flaw in Aqua--the absence of "focus follows mouse", as it is sometimes called in an X
Yes, this is indeed a very nice feature (I've been using it on unix all time), but it can be disastrous at the same time. MS Windows has an undocumented registry key which allows you to enable this, but once you do that you'll realize that a lot of applications assume 'topmost-has-focus' state and are almost unusable if the 'focus-follows-mouse' is enabled (example: if you have a mouse over a toolbar your document window is inactive - most applications can't deal with that). I'm not sure about this in OS X (since we can't really test it ;P), but something similar might happen.
Jan cited "Gerben Wierda's i-installer" as a source for jpeg, png, and teTex. This source is somehow more "official" than fink? But, considering what Jan says, i.e. "everything needed in /usr/local will" be included with the installer package, it doesn't matter to the end user.
Exactly, that's the point :) We don't want to assume things that are non-standard. We should provide them if necessary. There is still one issue to consider in this context: source packages. A really 'plain' Mac OS X can't be used to install source packages as-is, basically because there are three missing things: Dev Tools, g77 and latex. The first one is official, so we could require that (and probably have to). G77 is really just a few files, so the installer could add it if necessary, but I'm not sure about latex. Is building packages w/o latex documentation an option? The direct use of source packages seems to me as the greatest benefit of OSX being unix-based, therefore i wouldn't like to miss it, even if I was pure Mac user... Cheers, Simon --- Simon Urbanek Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis University of Augsburg Universit?tsstr. 14 86135 Augsburg Germany Tel: +49-821-598-2236 Fax: +49-821-598-2200 Simon.Urbanek@Math.Uni-Augsburg.de http://simon.urbanek.info
On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 05:11 PM, Don MacQueen wrote:
The really native version doesn't really need to depend on X11 anymore since the use of X11 on Mac OS X was meant for applications that are not properly ported to OS X yet. Once Quartz and RAqua are complete there is no need for X11.
Except for one major flaw in Aqua--the absence of "focus follows mouse", as it is sometimes called in an X
Yes, this is indeed a very nice feature (I've been using it on unix all time), but it can be disastrous at the same time. MS Windows has an undocumented registry key which allows you to enable this, but once you do that you'll realize that a lot of applications assume 'topmost-has-focus' state and are almost unusable if the 'focus-follows-mouse' is enabled (example: if you have a mouse over a toolbar your document window is inactive - most applications can't deal with that). I'm not sure about this in OS X (since we can't really test it ;P), but something similar might happen.
It's a documented part of TweakUI, and I find it very usable. After all, it I have my mouse over something on the toolbar, I have deliberately moved focus there (just as in CDE), and it is very natural to someone used to this from a good Unix windows manager. Only a very few applications cause me problems (most notably the Visual Basic IDE).
Jan cited "Gerben Wierda's i-installer" as a source for jpeg, png, and teTex. This source is somehow more "official" than fink? But, considering what Jan says, i.e. "everything needed in /usr/local will" be included with the installer package, it doesn't matter to the end user.
Exactly, that's the point :) We don't want to assume things that are non-standard. We should provide them if necessary. There is still one issue to consider in this context: source packages. A really 'plain' Mac OS X can't be used to install source packages as-is, basically because there are three missing things: Dev Tools, g77 and latex. The first one is official, so we could require that (and probably have to). G77 is really just a few files, so the installer could add it if necessary, but I'm not sure about latex. Is building packages w/o latex documentation an option?
It could be. Checking them is not, though.
The direct use of source packages seems to me as the greatest benefit of OSX being unix-based, therefore i wouldn't like to miss it, even if I was pure Mac user...
At DSC we seemed to decide that we would need a binary packages mechanism for the GUI MacOS X port. I suspect you underestimate the difficulties (or overestimate the abilities of the users concerned): the Windows experience is that is hard to overestimate the ability of the users to make stupid errors and not realize what. As for this being `just another unix version': if only! Simple things on any other unix-alike like making a Rlapack dynamic library became major headaches on darwin, only, and that is still not fully resolved.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
At 5:45 PM +0200 6/17/03, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 05:11 PM, Don MacQueen wrote:
The really native version doesn't really need to depend on X11 anymore since the use of X11 on Mac OS X was meant for applications that are not properly ported to OS X yet. Once Quartz and RAqua are complete there is no need for X11.
Except for one major flaw in Aqua--the absence of "focus follows mouse", as it is sometimes called in an X
Yes, this is indeed a very nice feature (I've been using it on unix all time), but it can be disastrous at the same time. MS Windows has an undocumented registry key which allows you to enable this, but once you do that you'll realize that a lot of applications assume 'topmost-has-focus' state and are almost unusable if the 'focus-follows-mouse' is enabled (example: if you have a mouse over a toolbar your document window is inactive - most applications can't deal with that). I'm not sure about this in OS X (since we can't really test it ;P), but something similar might happen.
Jan cited "Gerben Wierda's i-installer" as a source for jpeg, png, and teTex. This source is somehow more "official" than fink? But, considering what Jan says, i.e. "everything needed in /usr/local will" be included with the installer package, it doesn't matter to the end user.
Exactly, that's the point :) We don't want to assume things that are non-standard. We should provide them if necessary. There is still one issue to consider in this context: source packages. A really 'plain' Mac OS X can't be used to install source packages as-is, basically because there are three missing things: Dev Tools, g77 and latex. The first one is official, so we could require that (and probably have to). G77 is really just a few files, so the installer could add it if necessary, but I'm not sure about latex. Is building packages w/o latex documentation an option?
For an OS X user with no unix background, I would think that pdf is the preferred format, and sufficient.
The direct use of source packages seems to me as the greatest benefit of OSX being unix-based, therefore i wouldn't like to miss it, even if I was pure Mac user... Cheers, Simon --- Simon Urbanek Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis University of Augsburg Universit?tsstr. 14 86135 Augsburg Germany Tel: +49-821-598-2236 Fax: +49-821-598-2200 Simon.Urbanek@Math.Uni-Augsburg.de http://simon.urbanek.info
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-------------------------------------- Don MacQueen Environmental Protection Department Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore, CA, USA