Older version of R in mac OS X 10.10.5 - r

Question

I have a problem downloading R in my mac which I have been dealing with for many hours now.
My purpose is to use propensity score matching in SPSS (from source forge). I am using SPSS version 22 on my mac OS X yosemite 10.10.5.
After reading a lot on the different sites I need to use R.2.15 for SPSS 22 in order to use the psmatching 3.03 on source forge.
However, I cannot seem to install R 2.15 when I run the installation package. When I am going to select destination on the macintosh HD, it says that R2.15.0 for Mac OS X 10.5 or higher can’t be installed on this disk. How is this possible? My OS X version is higher than the demanded version for R 2.15.
Any ideas how to make the installation?

Answer 1

I've run into this problem myself: SPSS versions require very specific versions of R to be installed for the R Integration plug-in to work. An older or newer version of R will not suffice.
I think the installation error is due to the old R installer's attempt to verify a sufficiently high OS X system version. But it doesn't recognize 10.10+ as being higher than 10.9 (or 10.5 for that matter).
The link below has information about disabling OS X El Capitan's System Integrity Protection, in order to change the OS X file /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist, so that a false system version can be reported to the installer.
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/4138
A safer method might be to manually place the files from R's 2.15 installer. There's an apparent complication with my attempt at that, though. I opened the R 2.15.pkg installer file, found a file 'payload' inside, used 'tar -xzvf Payload' to extract contents, and moved those contents into /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/2.15. In retrospect, it may be most useful to temporarily re-alias "Current" in the R.frameworks folder so that it points to 2.15 version while the installer completes. Instead, I did the following to get around installer error messages I found in the installer log file, which worked for me:
The SPSS Essentials for R installer reported that the install location does not contain R 2.15. Examining the error log files led me to believe that the installer's attempt to verify the R version inappropriately navigated to the "Current" version (aliased to a specific version, likely not R 2.15 if 2.15 was installed manually), even if the directory for 2.15 was specifically entered into the installer. It then seeks a couple of i386 subdirectories that no longer exist as of R 3.2.2. So (for my case) I manually created "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.2/Resources/bin/exec/i386" and copied version 2.15 of the R unix executable, and did similarly for "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.2/Resources/etc/i386", copying in the ldpaths file that the installer seeks. Doing so finally allowed the SPSS Essentials for R installer to complete. In retrospect, temporarily re-aliasing "Current" in the R.frameworks folder might have been a more direct approach, but I haven't tried that as of right now.

Answer 2

For what it's worth, I was able to install an older version of R (for a different purpose, but I found this page while trying to figure it out), without having to temporarily change the version of OS X (or macOS) on my system. That seemed dangerous to me, and I wanted a simpler fix.
What worked for me was extracting the installer pkg, modifying the version check in there, and then packaging it up again.
Downloading the pkg installer from CRAN
open Terminal and cd to the directory where the installer is: e.g.,
cd ~/Downloads
use pkgutil to expand the pkg file you downloaded
pkgutil --expand R-2.15.0.pkg R-2.15.0
This creates a folder named R-2.15.0 (You can name it whatever you want in the command above). In that folder is a text file called Distribution.
Open the Distribution file in a text editor (e.g., TextEdit), and
modify the function at the beginning that checks the version of OS
X. for example, if it requires Leopard, there will be a line that
looks like this:
if(!(my.target.systemVersion.ProductVersion >= '10.5.0')) {
...
}
Notice that version string for comparison is a string (not a number!), so any version past 10.9 (10.10 and up) will fail that check ('10.10' sorts between '10.1' and '10.2', which is less than '10.5').
All I did was change the minimum version here ('10.5.0') to '10.1'. So the same line reads:
if(!(my.target.systemVersion.ProductVersion >= '10.1')) {
Save the Distribution file.
Go back to terminal and re-package the directory you created in step 3:
pkgutil --flatten R-2.15.0 R-2.15.0-HACKED.pkg
You can call the new pkg whatever you want, as long as you will recognize it.
The resulting package (R-2.15.0-HACKED.pkg, in this example) will now run on any version of OS X higher than or equal to the version you specified (in this case, 10.1 and up).
Disclaimer: I actually tested this with R-2.12.0 (and it worked), but I provided example code for R-2.15.0 to answer the original question. It should be similar with any R installer pkg for OS X that uses a similar version string to check for compatibility before installation.