Rcmdr problems (was:Re: [R] Minor nuisance with rw1071)

[John Fox]

Dear Kjetil,

At 11:04 PM 7/21/2003 -0400, kjetil brinchmann halvorsen wrote:
>On 18 Jul 2003 at 9:54, John Fox wrote:
>
>Sorry for being so late coming back on this, I was travelling the
>weekend. I tried to remove as much as possible from the workspace
>(.RData file), but nothing created by Rcmdr. This did'nt change
>anything.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why not just remove the .RData file 
(or rename it temporarily, if it contains something important)?

>Then I downloaded the latest Rcmdr (0.9-0, development version) from
>John Fox page, and compiled it myself for windows. The focus problem
>is unchanged, but now the problems with attaching a dataset has gone,
>the warnings about _ being deprecated has gone, happily.

I'm glad that you finally got the package to work, but it's curious that 
you had to compile it yourself. Many people have used the Windows binary 
package from my web site without this difficulty, and the older Windows 
binary on CRAN wasn't compiled by me.

>Also, the problem with printing the .logFont variable seems to have
>gone. In all but one trials it did'nt bomb Rgui.

If Rcmdr brings down Rgui in a reproducible way, I'd be interested to learn 
about it. I haven't experienced this behaviour myself nor heard about it 
before.

I recall that you mentioned that you've been running Rcmdr in a separate 
directory. Do you observe the same problem when you load the package after 
starting R in another place? Is there anything unusual about your system 
that we haven't discussed? For example, are you using the Tcl/Tk 
distribution that comes with the R installer? I'm still at a loss to 
understand why you've been experiencing these difficulties.

Regards,
  John

>Kjetil
>
> > Dear Brian,
> >
> > At 08:32 AM 7/18/2003 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> > >I believe it's a side effect of starting up tcltk.  That grabs focus for
> > >its invisible window: there's a kludgy workaround in the tcltk startup
> > >code, but that it looks like that is not working during the startup
> > >(which here seems to be something in .RData).
> >
> > That there's something in .RData causing the problem is a good guess. To
> > provide a bit more context: Kjetil reports to me that he's unable to use
> > the Rcmdr GUI without generating "Warning: The use of _ is soon to be
> > removed: you will be warned repeatedly" and parse errors. Of course, I
> > don't use underscores in any of my code.
> >
> > The only other similar report that I received was from Martin Maechler
> > using Rcmdr under Emacs/ESS on a Linux machine. That problem went away 
> when
> > he ran R from a terminal rather than from Emacs, but perhaps that was
> > coincidence. (Rcmdr works for me under XEmacs/ESS under Windows, though
> > it's not a natural marriage.)
> >
> > As a more general matter, I've encountered but been able to work around a
> > variety of focus problems using the tcltk package.
> >
> > Regards,
> >   John
> >
> >
> > -----------------------------------------------------
> > John Fox
> > Department of Sociology
> > McMaster University
> > Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M4
> > email: jfox at mcmaster.ca
> > phone: 905-525-9140x23604
> > web: www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox
> > -----------------------------------------------------
> >

-----------------------------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M4
email: jfox at mcmaster.ca
phone: 905-525-9140x23604
web: www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox