Thanks for the reply, Dirk. It sounds like xvfb-run is a great solution when you want R to assume an X window system is present but isn’t?
I think what I'm trying to figure out, and propose for the community to possibly fix, is slightly different than would be solved by xvfb-run. I'm wondering if --with-cairo presents a design flaw (maybe an abstraction inversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_inversion) wherein the window system is taken for granted to be X and there is no way to change it/use Cairo differently? This has at least two consequences that I understand: - Most importantly, it makes --with-cairo silently incompatible with --without-x. If this is really intended, I think it should at least raise a warning? - I think it also means, (as far as I know, but could well be wrong), that there is not a way to use R where you rely solely Cairo’s rendering abilities to replace the complexity of needing a specific window system present? (This is my use case -- use cairo so R can be agnostic about a window system). Given that the earlier conversations made a fix sound rather trivial (use cairo.h instead of cairo-xlib.h), I’m wondering if there is a path to getting that implemented? Thanks a lot, -Stephen Marsh On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 9:35 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> wrote: > > On 25 July 2018 at 21:04, Stephen Marsh wrote: > | So the Homebrew community dropped support for --with-cairo which is a > shame > | because --without-x --with-cairo is an important combination for any > | environment that might need to generate graphics without X11 (or related) > | dependencies (macOS, headless linux servers). > > For headless use on Linux, just build as usual and run via `xvfb-run`. If > you > need to create cairo-based graphics, install one of the (at least two) > cairo > device packages from CRAN. > > Dirk > > -- > http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org > -- stephenmarsh.co [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
