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Do Darwinports and R play nice on Tiger?

6 messages · Douglas Bates, Simon Urbanek, Charilaos Skiadas +2 more

Original
Douglas Bates
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I would like to install gnucash on a Macbook running OS X 10.5.4.  It
appears that I would need either Fink or Darwinports installed to
install gnucash.  Because my past experiences with Fink have not been
positive I am considering installing Darwinports.  However, I notice
that they want me to override many system libraries with their
versions of the libraries (http://gnucash.darwinports.com/install/).
Am I likely to cause problems with R running on this system if I do
so?
Simon Urbanek
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On Sep 7, 2008, at 8:54 AM, Douglas Bates wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
As long as you are using CRAN binary you should be fine (also assuming  
that you [or DarwinPorts] won't mess with DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH). Problems  
start when DP installs any compilers and puts them on the PATH. Even  
more problems start if you try to use the R build from DP. Mixing R  
and DP for packages is not a good idea.
In general, make sure you have control over your startup files so you  
can enable/disable DP at will (this also applies to Fink).

Cheers,
Simon

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Charilaos Skiadas
    

    

      
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On Sep 7, 2008, at 8:54 AM, Douglas Bates wrote:

        

            

      
      
      
    

        
You will probably get differing opinions on the matter. It's probably  
not just a question about R, but also other things like TeX. You are  
not actually overriding system libraries, you are just putting the  
darwinports binaries earlier on the shell path. But I must be missing  
something, can't you just compile directly from the gnucash source?  
It shouldn't be much harder than installing darwinports, so unless  
you need a lot of other darwinports stuff, I see no reason to mess up  
with the system more than you have to.

Btw, I believe it's called MacPorts now.

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Kjell Konis
    

    

      
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On Sep 7, 2008, at 3:46 PM, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:

        

            

      
      
      
    

        
One caveat: when the name of the DarwinPorts project was changed to  
MacPorts, darwinports.ORG became macports.org. The website in the  
link in the original post

   http://gnucash.darwinports.com/install/

is hosted at darwinports.COM which is independent of the {Darwin,Mac} 
Ports project (and presumably exists to generate some Google Ad Words  
revenue). This time around the MacPorts project also registered the  
MacPorts.com domain and forwards connections to MacPorts.org.

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Steve Revilak
    

    

      
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I have around 40 Darwinports packages installed on Mac OS X 10.4.11
(but not gnucash), along with R (CRAN binaries) and a texlive
distribution; I also have a similar arrangement on another machine
running Mac OS X 10.5.4 (albeit with fewer Darwinports packages).  In
general, I've found Darwinports to be very reliable, and I've never
had problems with Darwinports interfering with R or tex (or vice
versa).

If you're truly worried, you can always append /opt/local/bin to your
PATH instead of prepending it.

Some Darwinports packages have a lot of dependencies.  However,
Darwinports seems to install everything in /opt/local, along with
supplying the appropriate library directories during compilation.

I don't see any harm in installing gnucash via Darwinports.  If, later
on, you suspect that Darwinports is causing a conflict with some other
software on your machine, you can easily confirm (or refute) that
suspicion by renaming /opt/local to /opt/local.NO.  Or, just uninstall
it.
For gnucash, installing via a package management system seems like the
safest bet.  IIRC, gnucash depends on a lot of libraries that aren't
part of Mac OS (e.g., gnome).

Steve

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Steve Revilak
    

    

      
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One small correction, I should have said "MacPorts" instead of
"Darwinports".  (Thanks to Kjell Konis for reminding me of the name
change).