Why my R uses a different Darwin version from the one of my MacOS system?

Question

I'm using MacOS X 10.9.1 Mavericks. When I launch R, I have the follow "introductory" message

R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25) -- "Frisbee Sailing"
Copyright (C) 2013 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

And when i go to the system information:

System Software Overview:

  System Version:   OS X 10.9.1 (13B3116)
  Kernel Version:   Darwin 13.0.2

Is it normal that the version of Darwin in R is different from this one of my system?

Answer 1

I assume you installed a pre-compiled version (i.e. from DMG rather than from sources tar.gz). The version of OSX you see in the welcome message is the version it was compiled with (the packagers'), not the version it is running on (yours.)