[R] R 2.11.1 is released

[Peter Dalgaard]

On May 31, 2010, at 1:38 PM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:

> On 05/31/10 10:16 AM, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
>> 
>>                 CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.11.1
>> 
>> 
>> INSTALLATION
>> 
>>     o   Command 'gnutar' is preferred to 'tar' when configure sets
>>         TAR.  This is needed on Mac OS 10.6, where the default tar,
>>         bsdtar 2.6.2, has been reported to produce archives with
>>         illegal extensions to tar (according to the POSIX standard).
> 
> Note 'gnutar' is not part of POSIX, so this might cause more problems than it solves.
> 
> On Solaris, /usr/sfw/bin/gtar is the GNU version of tar, though I don't know for sure if one can guarantee that will always be on all Solaris systems. It is certainly the case of a full-install on Solaris 10 on SPARC, and I find that file exists on my OpenSolaris 06/2009 x64 release running on my Sun Ultra 27, though whether it actually exists on a system which has not had it specifically installed I don't know.
> 
> I would have thought the best decision was to get people to put a working version of 'tar' in their path first - not use some non-standard name.
> 

(Please don't put my address on things that are meant to be discussed on r-help. I just wrap up the releases, it's not like I make decisions about $TAR personally.)

Anyways, if you had been in this game for as long as R Core has, you would know that the best decision is never "to get people to" do anything. They just don't. 

Notice that it says that gnutar is "preferred", so all we are doing is to say that when it is there, we know what it is, warts and all, POSIX or not, and we will rather use it than whatever modified version the OS designers may have put in as the system tar.


-- 
Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com