Requirement

To build R-devel from source on Mac OS X 10.8, following two tools are at least required.

1. Xcode Development Tools
2. GNU Fortran Compiler

These can be gotten at the App Store and at urls below.

• http://r.research.att.com/tools/
• http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/tools/
  ( http://cran.ism.ac.jp/bin/macosx/tools/ )

Unfortunately, the gcc come with Apple’s Xcode doesn’t have a Fortran compiler.   That is why we need to get it separately.   I chose the gfortran, and it looks like a good choice.

Source

The latest development version is R-devel.tar.gz or R-devel.tar.bz2.
Available at

• http://cran.r-project.org/sources.html
• http://cran.ism.ac.jp/sources.html

Daily snapshots are files something like R-devel_2013-09-20.tar.bz2.

Available at the anonymous ftp

• ftp://ftp.stat.math.ethz.ch/Software/R

Build

1. Extract the source tar ball, and cd R-devel.
2. Edit the file conifg.site.
3. I added two lines as below to let the Fortran compiler work.

F77="gfortran -arch x86_64"
FC=$F77

Details are written at

• http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-admin.html#OS-X

4. Configure & make

./configure --without-x
make
make check
make pdf
make info

Details are written at

• http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-admin.html#Installing-R-under-Unix_002dalikes
• http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-admin.html#Making-the-manuals
• http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-admin.html#OS-X

Install

As a default for Mac OS X, the R-devel installation will overwrite and destroy the existing stable R.  To avoid this, the prefix must be explicitly specified on installation.

make prefix=/my/development/work/space install

Note that the end of the prefix path should not have a slash (/).
Details are written at

• http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-admin.html#Installation

The R executable is found at

/my/development/work/space/R.framework/Resources/R

Now, I can do R CMD on the latest R-devel to build and check a package.  Before submitting a package to CRAN, R CMD check with an option --as-cran on the latest development version is required.
As written in

• http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html

R CMD check --as-cran elliplot_1.0.0.tar.gz

This may raise some important warnings, though the package has passed the normal check.