[R] Bugs through R in Mac

[Bill Northcott]

On 21/01/2008, at 10:00 PM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
> Fredrik Lundgren wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I recently changed from Win XP to Mac OS X (10.5.1).
>> Is there a way to run  Bugs (in any version) in R (R version 2.6.0
>> (2007-10-03)) on this platform?
>>
>
> Which way to "run Bugs in R" did you use in Windows?
> On MacOS X, a solution that should work but is completely inelegant is
> using the package R2WinBUGS, and running WinBUGS within DarWINE. There
> are some rumors that OpenBUGS development will be forced within the  
> next
> couple of months, but I am not that confident that we will have a
> natively working BRugs version on Mac OS X or Linux this year ...

I just posted a message about this on r-sig-mac.

I spent a little time on this late last year.

WinBUGS runs happily under DarWINE or the commercial package  
CrossoverMac.  There is nothing inelegant about it.

R2WinBUGS is another can of worms.  The code to support running  
WinBUGS in WINE on Linux or Mac is thoroughly broken.  The problem is  
in the need to convert Windows paths to UNIX ones.  R2WinBUGS does  
this using undocumented and unsupported features of some versions of  
WINE.  As is the way with unsupported features these have been changed  
on recent versions of WINE and broken R2WinBUGS.

The fix is not trivial, and the WINE support stuff in R2WinBUGS needs  
to be completely rewritten.  I can see what needs to be done, and if I  
find the time, I will fix it.

You can also use JAGS ( http://www-fis.iarc.fr/~martyn/software/ 
jags/ ) which has now reached version 1.0.1 and has an R support  
package rjags.  I hope to post a fat Mac binary for this before the  
end of the week.  In testing, this works on Leopard with a 32 bit R  
controlling a 64 bit JAGS binary which is sort of cool.  Now all we  
need is to be able to run multiple chains on different CPUs but there  
are some issues with the RNGs from R which are used in JAGS.

Bill Northcott