build instructions

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Friday May 12 2017 16:46:14 meik michalke wrote:

> R comes with a rather primitive GUI itself, but most people are probably using 

I just checked: I must have been using R.app - I still have v1.34 installed, with R 2.11.1 .
There's a built-in package manager which worked quite well and didn't oblige me to wonder where to install them ;)

> RKWard combines that with a GUI (with plugin support for even more statistical 
> dialogs).

At the time there were none that I can remember, so I wrote them myself with TclTk :) I only needed a handful of tests anyway.

But you mention students ... shouldn't they rather be using the commandline or script files, you know, to get hands-on experience with what's going on behind those fancy dialogs? ;)

> > The Qt5 port currently in MacPorts is still at 5.7.1 but is "stock" with
> > just a few bug fixes.
> 
> everything from 5.6 onward should do -- says the webpage ;-)

I forgot, there's also a Qt56 port, if the LTS release is good enough for you.

> yes, that's what we do. the official policy is to not use /opt/local for 
> packages, because that might mess up an actual MacPorts installation. our 
> packages install to /opt/rkward.

Which explains why you have to build everything.

As I said, I don't know if an installer package created with MacPorts will mess up an existing MacPorts install. Maybe it doesn't, you'd have to ask on the mailing list.

> but the thing is, MacPorts puts literally everything into the bundle that is a 
> dependency of dependencies, that's how we end up with >>1GB for an installed 

That's because the package is created to allow installing from scratch. Somewhere down the line a dependency claims a dependency on ffmpeg (that could well be libVLC or else phonon-backend-gstreamer), and there you go.

You can do `port rdeps foo` to get a recursive tree of all dependencies, that allows you to figure out where the big unexpected (non-)dependencies come from. Sometimes you can get rid of them by installing their dependent with a variant.

> package. for just using RKWard, clearly only a fraction of that is needed, and 
> i've actually already removed ports from the bundle semi-manually to make it 
> smaller. e.g., we're pretty confident we don't need ffmpeg for statistics...

No (unless you want to be able to input audio or video data, maybe? 8-))
Isn't there a way to build a package that contains only a specific port? You'd need to figure out how to create the required packages, and a script that installs them in the right order, but that's largely something you only have to do once.

R.