INSTALL

You need R built and installed as a framework: see the 'R Installation
and Administration Manual'.  A CRAN binary install of R suffices.

 Building R.app
================

Only Mac OS X 10.6 and higher are supported, and only 64-bit R. The
project is called "R.xcodeproj" and requires Xcode 3.2 or higher.

The project can be built by selecting "R" target and "Build" inside
the XCode GUI.

Supported configurations are:
  SnowLeopard64 (release, current OS X, default)
  Lion64 (release, OS X 10.7+, Xcode 4.5+)
  MLion64 (release, OS X 10.8+, Xcode 4.5+)
  Debug (with debugging output, current OS X)

The configurations differ mainly in the SDK selected (recent versions
of Xcode only support the current and immediately previous SDKs, so
for example in Mar 2013 the default would build for 10.8, but
configuration Lion64 allows building for >= 10.7).

To build the project from the command line in the Mac-GUI directory
use something like:
	xcodebuild -target R -configuration SnowLeopard64

To build the R for Mac OS X FAQ use either
	xcodebuild -target Docs
or manually in docs folder
	makeinfo -D UseExternalXrefs --html --force --no-split RMacOSX-FAQ.texi
	
The resulting html FAQ file will be found in Mac-GUI/docs directory.


Note about binary compatibility:

The general rules for R apply, that is binary compatibility is given
only if the major and minor version numbers match - only the patch
level may differ. When using the X.Y.Z version form it means that X.Y
must match. For example R-GUIs linked to 3.0.x and 3.1.x are NOT
binary compatible.

The compiled R.app is usually bound to a specific version, such as
3.0.1. If you upgrade R removing the older version, let's say using
R.app built for 3.0.0 and updating R to 3.0.1, you may need to fix the
absolute path to libR.dylib. The nightly builds use a generic path
/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/lib/libR.dylib which points
to the latest version of R, but this is done by an additional call to
install_name_tool in the building script.  Release versions of the GUI
use a fixed-version path as they come with a specific R version (in fact
the default behavior doesn't depends on the GUI, but on libR.dylib -
changing its own reference entry changes the way R.app is linked).

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Last update: 2013-03-08