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). -- Last update: 2013-03-08