[R] R2winBUGS & WinBUGS gui

[Ben Bolker]

Evan Cooch wrote:
> 
> 
>>
>> Yes, sure, and indeed, it is a shame that nobody of those people who 
>> want it to work under Linux is trying to submit patches to make it work.
>>
>>
>>
> I agree, but I *think* the primary reason for this is that it requires 
> installing Blackbox as a PASCAL compiler. For much of the Linux 
> community, if it doesn't make use of a standard GNU compiler (there *is* 
> a GNU Pascal compiler, but since I (and most others) don't know PASCAL, 
> I've never installed it), there will be little interest. Of course, what 
> seems attractive about JAGS is that it is less dependent on a non-GNU 
> compiler (although the dependencies to Blackbox may not be large - 
> relative to GNU Pascal - don't know), and is written in a more familiar 
> language.
> 
> What everyone wants is a tarball with a simple configure, make, make 
> install sequence, that plays nice with R, under linux, which is the OS 
> of choice (based on the statistics I have) for folks with high-end 
> hardware (read - multi-processor 64-bit chips with a 64-bit OS). Of 
> course, this doesn't happen by itself (your point is well-taken).
> 
> 

  I'd like to second Evan's point.  I would try to help with OpenBUGS
if I could, but the little bit that I looked at convinced me that it would
mean getting up to speed on a big, complicated black box (so to
speak) -- and it seems that even the experts on OpenBUGS can't
really figure out what's going on.

There are many threads about this ... the thread ending around

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2007-August/046632.html

suggests that Tobias Verbeke did find a way to wrap OpenBUGS on Linux
to run it without Wine (and without a Windows front-end?) -- Uwe indicated
that he would prefer it to go into R2WinBUGS with the other "ugly wrappers"
...
So the three choices for running BUGS analyses more-or-less natively, and/or
without
firing up the WinBUGS window, are ...

 1. make Tobias's stuff work with R2WinBUGS or BRugs
 2. switch to JAGS
 3. make OpenBUGS compilation work on Linux

  #1 seems to be the best short-term prospect; #2 might be best in
the long term (a second, and possibly cleaner, implementation of an
engine to interpret BUGS(like) code, that runs cross-platform etc.);
#3 would be best for continuing the effectiveness/spread of the original
BUGS lineage.  (Does OpenBUGS compile on the Mac ... ????)

   I may try to work on these at some point, but probably not in the
next month ...
   
  Ben Bolker

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