Building lme4.0 on OS X 10.9 (Mavericks)

My laptop died recently, and I am stuck with a new hard drive and a fresh OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) installation.  I wanted to install lme4.0. This turned out to be trickier than I’d expected, because Xcode 5.0 doesn’t include a Fortran compiler. This can be solved by installing a Fortran compiler from http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/tools/. Many thanks to Simon Urbanek for this advice.  A couple of other potentially useful notes:

  • I find that you can no longer install Command Line Tools from within Xcode.  I also was unsuccessful in running xcode-select --install, which used to work; I get the error “Can’t install the software because it is not currently available from the Software Update server”. However, downloading directly from https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action does work for me.
  • MacPorts offers Fortran compilers within recent gcc versions — e.g., gcc49 installs a Fortran compiler at /opt/local/bin/gfortran.  But these won’t meet R’s needs; Simon Urbanek states:

    The CRAN build is a native build of R and only supports native compilers.

Update 6 March 2014: Recently Yan Chen used this advice to install lme4.0 on her Mac. She reports that the complete sequence of actions that led to success for her were:

  1. Install Command Line Tools
  2. Install the gfortran compiler
  3. Modify the Makeconf file in /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/etc to contain the lines


    CC=clang
    CXX=clang++

  4. Upgrade the Matrix package in R to version 1.0.0 or higher
  5. Build lme4.0 following the directions in the tarball

We hope that this may work for you too!

 

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