how to use gWidgets2 in OS X Mavericks

[wanghaisheng]

OS X Mavericks binaries is not available.
could you provide one?or Is there any possible for me to use this one

[jverzani]

You can use type="source" I would think. There is no compilation involved.

[davidcsterratt]

That should be fine for using the tcltk toolkit, but not for the RGtk toolkit, which is a pain to install on newer versions of Mac OS X:
http://marcoghislanzoni.com/blog/2014/08/29/solved-installing-rattle-r-3-1-mac-os-x-10-9

This is a problem Mac users of my retistruct pacakge (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/retistruct/index.html) are facing. I'm whether I should focus my efforts on:

1. Trying to make Mac GTK binaries available, as they are for earlier versions of OS X (tricky for me, as I'm not a Mac user)
2. Moving to a Java interface, perhaps using deducer. I'd rather not do this, as it would involve a substantial code rewrite, and there seems to be lots of stuff in the deducer package that I don't want.
3. Trying to revive the gWidgetsJava package (though there must be a good reason it was dropped).

Using tcltk doesn't seem to be an option, as I need to be able to use identify() in plots. It's been suggested to me that I could try to package the whole app in docker, but I'm not sure about how GUIs work in docker.

[sje30]

I can help David with debugging any test packages as I have a mac (currently running 10.9).

[jverzani]

I wish I could help here. At some point there was a magic combination that I could get RGtk working on my Mac, but now I just fix things on the package within a virtual machine. (I want the newer Gtk3 libraries for something else and keeping both was an issue). I think the best option is to soldier on with trying to get RGtk2 to work on the mac, as the rJava interface is problematic (no interest, and a bigger pain to develop). You might try gWidgets2Qt, but I'm not sure getting qtbase to work is any easier than RGtk2 on the mac.

[davidcsterratt]

Thanks for the help.

I'd not thought about the Gtk3 libraries. I understand that once
MacPorts is installed, it's possible to install the Gtk3 libraries using

port install gtk3

or even

port install gtk3 +no_x11 +quartz

One option might be to try produce RGtk3, i.e. a version of RGtk2 using
Gtk3 libraries. Having said that, it seems that there is still an
(unmaintained) macport for Gtk2, so perhaps it would be good to advise
people to use this instead of the convoluted procedure I linked to
earlier.

[davidcsterratt]

I've summarised the various possibilities for installing RGtk2 here: davidcsterratt/retistruct#4