At this month’s BoulderRuby meeting, Randall Thomas gave a talk. During his talk, he told us about R, a statistical programming language. I’d heard of it in passing, but hadn’t tried it. After seeing how cool maps could be generated with very little code, I decided to try it out.
I went to the download page and grabbed the latest binary package for OS X. It comes as a .pkg file. I opened it, and the installation process started. Unfortunately, near the end of the installation, it hung, on the Preparing R 2.10.1 for Mac OS X 10.5 or higher (Leopard build)… step. I switched to another application, and ten minutes later, it was still stuck.
I tried googling specifically for the R installer hanging, but didn’t find anything. I started searching for OS X package installer hanging instead. Finally, I saw a bug report about git-osx-installer hanging under similar circumstances, to which Seth Milliken replied saying that it’s caused by iPhone Simulator.
I was running iPhone Simulator, so I tried killing it, and the installer immediately stopped hanging and told me that installation failed. I ran the installer again and it worked.