I've spent the past several days figuring out how to package Rcmdr so
that it can be easily installed by students who are novices to R and
have Mac OS X machines, when I stumbled on a nasty little interplay
between R.app, Rcmdr, and saved workspaces. Specifically, if you save
a workspace during a session in which you have worked with Rcmdr,
quit that session, start a new R session using that same workspace
through R.app, and then load Rcmdr, what happens is that the main
Rcmdr window comes up, but it does not respond to any user actions.
To test things further, I quit R, started a new R session, loaded the
tcltk library, and typed demo(tkdensity). In this case, the quartz()
device with the initial distribution appears, but the Tk widget does
not. I then quit R, started an xterm session with R.framework
directly (bypassing R.app), and found that Rcmdr loads properly, and
takes user input. Of course, rgl does not work under this
configuration. I am working with the CRAN 2.2.1 release of R and all
the most current available support packages (including rgl) on CRAN
that Rcmdr needs. The version of Rcmdr is Rcmdr_1.1-5, which is a bit
odd since the current development release that John Fox has put out
is Rcmdr_1.1-3.
Again the steps to trigger an instance of the bug are:
(1) Start an R session with R.app.
(2) Install all needed packages for Rcmdr and Rcmdr itself.
(3) Start Rcmdr via the library(Rcmdr) command.
(4)Play with pulldown menus to convince yourself Rcmdr is alive.
(5) Use the pulldown menu sequence File -> Exit -> From Commander to
close Rcmdr.
(6) Quit the session, saving the workspace on exit.
(7) Start a new R session with R.app.
(8) Start Rcmdr and play with the pulldown menus to convince yourself
that Rcmdr is now dead.
(9) At this point you can't gracefully quit from Rcmdr, so just quit
from R to get rid of the window.
Sorry for the length of the post.
Dan
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