Homebrew R build missing Cairo

Question

I installed R on an OSX 10.7.5 server using brew:

brew install R

Everything seems so OK far, however Cairo is not working:

> svg(tempfile())
Warning messages:
1: In svg(tempfile()) :
  unable to load shared object '/usr/local/Cellar/r/2.15.2/R.framework/Resources/library/grDevices/libs//cairo.so':
  dlopen(/usr/local/Cellar/r/2.15.2/R.framework/Resources/library/grDevices/libs//cairo.so, 6): image not found
2: In svg(tempfile()) : failed to load cairo DLL

The shared object file seems to be missing completely:

id-86-243:Resources jeroen$ ls -ltr library/grDevices/libs/
total 488
-rwxrwxr-x  1 jeroen  admin  245764 Dec 22 17:03 grDevices.so

I rarely use OSX, so I am not quite sure if this is a bug in this particular distribution of R, or if I have done something wrong when building it?

Illumination

ISTR that Simon Urbanek discourages people from using homebrew to compile R. On Nov 4 2012 in the MacSIG he wrote: "You can't use CRAN binaries with homebrew. If you use homebrew, you're entirely on your own and you have to build everything from sources." – Heart

That's fine. In Linux we always install packages from source as well. grDevices is base R though. – Illumination

The default packages include both 'base' and 'grDevices', but grDevices is not in the 'base' package. – Heart

When installing R using macports, I have to make sure that I install r-framework and not just R. Maybe there is a similar issue with brew? I suggest to use macports. – Gomes

@DWin I was referring to its priority: svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/grDevices/DESCRIPTION.in – Illumination

Answer 1

I just ran into this problem. It seems to be a problem with pkg-config locating cairo during the R configure stage. The workaround seems to be:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig

so that R can properly use cairo.

I install R directly from source, rather than with homebrew, but I do use homebrew to keep other libraries up to date. This resolves the problem for me.

For reference, I am running OSX Mavericks.

Counteract

Installing from source in homebrew (i.e. as brew install R --build-from-source) caused R to be linked to the appropriate cairo library for me. – Convexoconvex

Answer 2

What finally worked for me was building R explicitly with cairo (brew's default R tap uses --without-cairo and simply editing the tap did not solve the issue for me).

It's all explained in this nice blog post: https://luispuerto.net/blog/2018/05/11/installing-r-with-homebrew-with-all-the-capabilities/

Works like a charm for me with R 4.0.2, cairo 1.16.0_3 under macOS Catalina 10.15.6.

Retinoscopy