[Rd] Possible bug(s) causing ggplot2 and XLConnect to crash recent builds of r-devel

[Chris Brien]

The following R code causes R to crashes under recent r-devel builds of R: 

library(ggplot2)
RCBD.lay <- data.frame(Blocks = factor(rep(1:5, each = 6)), 
                       Units = factor(rep(1:6, times = 5)),
                       Treatments = factor(rep(1:6, times = 5)))
ggplot(data = RCBD.lay, aes(x = Units, y = Blocks, label = Treatments)) +
  geom_text(aes(colour = Treatments))

I have installed and am running R on a Windows 10 machine with Rtools34.exe installed. I am using RStudio version 1.1.383

This bug happens with combined Windows 32/64 bit binary builds of the 2017-11-11 r73707 and 2017-11-14 r73724 development snapshot of R. It does not occur under the build of the 2017-06-27 r72859 development snapshot of R.

I installed the latest build with an empty R library tree " D:/Analyses/R LibDevel". 

> .libPaths()
[1] "D:/Analyses/R LibDevel"                         
[2] "C:/Program Files/StatSoft/R/R-devel.724/library"

I installed package ggplot2 and its dependencies from CRAN using RStudio. As a result the following 20 packages were the only packages installed in the previously empty library tree:

"colorspace","dichromat","digest","ggplot2","gtable","labeling","lazyeval",
  "magrittr","munsell","plyr","R6","RColorBrewer","Rcpp","reshape2","rlang","scales",
  "stringi","stringr","tibble","viridisLite"

I then executed the above code in the Console window of Rstudio (running 64 bit R) and received the message "R Session aborted" with the information that "R encountered a fatal error".

I also started the RGui for the 64-bit version and entered the same code into the console. The error message displayed in a dialog box was "R Windows GUI front-end has stopped working". Closing the dialog box cause RGui to close.

I had a similar experience with the package XLConnect.

Having used remove.packages to remove the ggplot2 and associated packages from the library, I installed XLConnect and it dependencies from CRAN from RStudio. Now the packages installed in "D:/Analyses/R LibDevel" were: "rJava", "XLConnect", "XLConnectJars".

In this case executing library(XLConnect) cause the same response - "R Session aborted" with the information that "R encountered a fatal error".

These are not packages that I maintain. However, I have packages (imageData and dae) that depend on ggplot2 and it seems that this bug is preventing me from compiling the packages under the most recent builds, although I can build the packages under the build of the 2017-06-27 r72859 development snapshot of R.

Regards, 

  Chris Brien

Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Statistics
-----
Phenomics and Bioinformatics Research Centre
University of South Australia
GPO Box 2471
ADELAIDE  5001  South Australia
Phone:  +61 8 8302 5535   Fax:  +61 8 8302 5785
Email:   Chris.Brien at unisa.edu.au 
WEB page:  <http://people.unisa.edu.au/Chris.Brien> 
CRICOS No 00121B