[ESS] Macintosh followup advice and question

[Vincent Goulet]

> Le 2015-02-13 à 16:48, Sparapani, Rodney <rsparapa using mcw.edu> a écrit :
> 
>>>> 2. Also we need to say "XQuartz" is a mandatory install, there's no point
>>>> having R without it.
>>> 
>>> With Stephen for this one. Granted, I'm not the most graphics heavy user,
>>> but I've only ever had to use XQuartz to display rgl graphics.
>>> 
>>> If we don't have XQuartz installed, we don't even see the output that uses
>> tcltk, such as the repo chooser in install.packages.  I'm not an Rcmdr
>> enthusiast, but some textbooks eagerly encourage the students to use it.
>> 
>> You mean you can get things like that to work without it?
>> 
>> I got the idea it was required from the R for Mac FAQ
>> 
>> http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html#Tcl_002fTk-issues
>> 
> 
> I have the same question.  Although, I notice the section Paul linked
> to above has something at the end that might explain it...

It may be a bit complicated depending on the audience, but I recommend to my students to make some basic configuration before they start installing packages. 

First, create a user library and install packages in there (especially useful on Windows for users without administrator privileges). Create a folder, say ~/R/library and put in ~/.Renviron:

R_LIBS_USER="~/R/library"

Second, specify a default CRAN mirror in ~/.Rprofile:

options(repos = "http://cran.ca.r-project.org")

And then I tell Emacs users, to write instead:

options(repos = "http://cran.ca.r-project.org", menu.graphics = FALSE)

and the Tcl/Tk issue is circumvented.

Nonetheless to say, that's also my own setup.

v.

> 
> If you don't like the X11 style of widgets and use command-line R you
> would probably want to build R using the Aqua version of Tcl/Tk (see
> the `R Installation and Administration Manual'). Note, however, that
> such builds do not work when used in the R.app GUI.
> 
> However, after reading RTFM, I don't see what they mean.  There is 
> this no reference to Aqua that I can find.  However, if you download
> the R source code, you will see that there is a configure option 
> --with-aqua  Is this what it takes to avoid XQuartz? 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Rodney
> 
> 
> 
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