[R-SIG-Mac] lme4/macos crossover question

[Ben Bolker]

As pointed out in this lme4 issue: https://github.com/lme4/lme4/issues/302 ,
lme4 is behaving badly on Snow Leopard, failing to find an
(apparently) exported function

urlhead <- "https://www.r-project.org/nosvn/R.check/r-"
urltail <- "/gamm4-00check.html"
versions <- c("devel-osx-x86_64-clang",
              "release-osx-x86_64-mavericks",
              "release-osx-x86_64-snowleopard")
checkfun <- function(ver) {
    uu <- paste0(urlhead,ver,urltail)
    rr <- readLines(url(uu,method="libcurl"))
    any(grepl("could not find function.*REMLcrit",rr))
}
sapply(versions,checkfun)

Here's the (broken to make Gmane happy) link to the bad case:

https://www.r-project.org/nosvn/R.check/
      r-release-osx-x86_64-snowleopard/gamm4-00check.html

The REMLcrit function is exported, at least in all recent versions of
the package (and we haven't been able to reproduce on any other
platforms).

Any ideas ... ?  Possibly the Snow Leopard test build on CRAN is
using an out-of-date version of lme4 ... ?

  thanks
    Ben Bolker