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Which version should I use?

4 messages · Phillip N Price, Jan de Leeuw, Don MacQueen +1 more

Original
Phillip N Price
# 
Apologies for the 0th-order question.  

I'm a longtime user of Splus, but I am switching (or trying, anyway) to
the Mac, and would like to take this opportunity to try R.  I'm mostly
hoping to _use_ R, not work on it, though I am of course happy to submit
bug reports and that sort of thing.

My immediate question is: should I use the Carbon/Iacus or the
Cocoa(?)/deLeeuw version?  Are there major functional differences?  Are
they similar in terms of stability?  Are there likely to be any
difficulties in set-up, or do they both "just work"; for the latter
question, does the specific species of X-windows matter?

Thanks in advance for answers, and thank you all for working on this
software.

--Phil Price
  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Jan de Leeuw
# 
It's the Darwin/deLeeuw version. There is no Cocoa version
yet, by anybody.

The answer to the question about which version to use is
not straightforward. If you want to run on OS 9 as well as
OS X, you have to use Carbon/Iacus. If you are a Mac
person through and through you will probably use that
one too. If you like the Aqua interface and the menus,
same preference.

If you are used to Unix/X11, then the Darwin/deLeeuw
version may be more appealing. Or if  you like to change
window managers every other day. Or if you like the menus
that come with the gnome interface and run R from the
gnome desktop. Or if you like to use update.packages().
Or if you want to be able to add additional packages a
bit more easily. Or if you want to use tcl/tk. Or Emacs
and ESS.

So far, I have somewhat of a bad conscience to use my
Mac as a Darwin/X11 machine, but I think the Darwin/deLeeuw
version is somewhat more complete and convenient for my
particular tastes. Eventually, I hope to be able to switch back
to a version that does not use X11, maybe to a Cocoa
interface to R running in Darwin (as we already have for
Perl, for Scheme48, for Chaitin's Lisp, for mySQL, for
Apache, and for Squeak)
On Tuesday, July 17, 2001, at 06:03 PM, Phillip N Price wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

        
===
Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics;
US mail: 9432 Boulter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554
phone (310)-825-9550;  fax (310)-206-5658;  email: deleeuw@stat.ucla.edu
homepage: http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~deleeuw
========================================================
           No matter where you go, there you are. --- Buckaroo Banzai
                    http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~deleeuw/sounds/nomatter.au
========================================================

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Don MacQueen
    

    

      
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I have installed and used both. Jan's summary is pretty good.

I don't remember whether the jpeg graphics driver is available in the 
native (Iacus) version (and can't check right now); it definitely is 
in the X11 (de Leeuw) version. Both have the postscript() graphics 
driver functioning. I have not yet tried dynamic linking to code 
written in another language (eg, fortran or C) with either version; 
that's a potential major difference.

The native version works "out of the box" so to speak. You definitely 
will want to install some version of X-windows to use the X11 
version, so there is some extra work there. I don't think it matters 
which X11 you use (there are only two to choose from, as far as I 
know, and they're fairly comparable, in my opinion, having tried 
both).

Actually, both versions of R are pretty easy to install, so you 
shouldn't rule out trying them both yourself.

-Don

        
At 6:03 PM -0700 7/17/01, Phillip N Price wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

        

  
    

      
      
    

  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      stefano iacus
    

    

      
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Jan version is a unix build for Darwin/X11.
For a unix user it is probably the "first best". "My" version is 
intedend to work on earlier versions of MacOS up to OSX.

I'm confident that Jan build is more stable then the carbon version. 
Major problems in my version is that I have to implement several stuff 
that are given for free under unix but not under MacOS and its 
compilers (!).

Both version accept dynamic linking well. Packages are examples of that.

As I am the only (actually) developer of R for MacOS and there are many 
things to implement it is not always esay for me that fix/implement all 
and R/Mac users are really precious for their feedback to me.

Stefano
p.s. thanks to Don for its opinion

        
On Mercoledì, luglio 18, 2001, at 05:32 , Don MacQueen wrote: