Fixing the gfortran permission problem for R on macOS
Introduction
I just installed the latest version of R (version 4.3.2 (2023-10-31) – “Eye
Holes”) and tried to build the oce
package. It failed, complaining about an
unknown developer for gfortran
. I tried reinstalling gfortran
from the
site recommended by R, but that didn’t help. I tried updating my brew`
version of
gfortran``, again with no joy. Then I started searching the web.
Eventually I got to a stackoverflow comment
that provided a solution that worked for me. It may also work for you, if you’re
having problems but be very careful to check that you know what you are doing. Also,
if you are reading this much past the date of posting, the site that holds gfortran
might have changed, so I recommend you navigate there first, to check.
With those provisos, here is what I did (the last step is not from that website; it’s just a cleanup action):
curl -LO https://github.com/R-macos/gcc-12-branch/releases/download/12.2-darwin-r0/gfortran-12.2-darwin20-r0-universal.tar.xz\n
sudo tar xvf gfortran-12.2-darwin20-r0-universal.tar.xz -C /
sudo ln -sfn $(xcrun --show-sdk-path) /opt/gfortran/SDK
rm gfortran-12.2-darwin20-r0-universal.tar.xz
After taking these steps, I was able to build oce
again.
PS. I think I’ve gone through quite a lot of R versions without having to fiddle with gfortran. So maybe something has changed on the R end. Then again, I am running a beta (pre-release) version of macOS, so that might be a problem also.