Here’s a small-ish example (some Formula are fairly long/involved/complex) of a Homebrew Formula for the cowsay utility (what, you don’t like to have ASCII animals give you handy messages?): Homebrew’s inventory of packages comes from github repositories that contain “Formulas” for where to get package components and how to (literally) make them work on OS X. MacPorts is another third-party package manager for OS X, but I use Homebrew, so you get Homebrew examples here. It’s similar to apt, yum and other package managers on linux/BSD that enable you to install open source (and other types of) packages without having to do the download→unarchive→compile→curse→google→compile→curse→google some more→compile→smile→test→install dance manually. Homebrew is the “missing package manager for OS X”. However, if you have a thick skin and can be somewhat self-sustaining, Homebrew is a superb alternative to setting up your R environment (and other things) on your OS X system. Now, there are issues with this since getting “support” for what may be R issues will be very difficult on the official mailing lists as you’ll immediately be told to “use the official distribution” by some stalwart R folks (this happens on StackOverflow and other forums as well). A few of the comments suggested that an “all Homebrew” solution may be preferable for some folks. In a previous post I provided “mouse-heavy” instructions for getting R running on your Mac.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |