On Sat, 5 May 2007, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> "BDR" == Prof Brian Ripley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>>>>> on Fri, 4 May 2007 22:09:58 +0100 (BST) writes:
>
> BDR> On Fri, 4 May 2007, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> >> On May 3, 2007, at 8:52 PM, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
> >>
> >>> [...] I have a couple of related questions. First,
> >>> dev.interactive (), used in example() and many demo()-s
> >>> to decide if the current device is interactive, is
> >>> currently implemented as:
> >>>
> >>>> dev.interactive
> >>> function (orNone = FALSE) { iDevs <- c("X11", "GTK",
> >>> "gnome", "quartz", "windows", "JavaGD") interactive() &&
> >>> (.Device %in% iDevs || (orNone && .Device == "null
> >>> device" && getOption("device") %in% iDevs)) }
> >>>
> >>> This makes it impossible for new devices to be treated
> >>> as interactive.
> >>
> >>
> >> I think we should finally pass this question to the
> >> device itself. For some devices like Cairo the answer
> >> depends on the parameters with which the device was
> >> created (e.g. type='x11' is interactive whereas
> >> type='png' is not), so each instance of the device will
> >> answer differently. We could simply add an another
> >> capability flag - that is IMHO the only reliable
> >> solution. Any other ideas?
>
> BDR> Do we need a reliable solution? The worst that happens
> BDR> that if R thinks a device is interactive and it is not,
> BDR> you get asked to go on to the next page a few times.
>
> BDR> I've altered R-devel to look at the displaylist. All
> BDR> the devices I knew had that enabled by default iff they
> BDR> are screen devices, but I've just looked at Cairo and
> BDR> it seems that could be a bit less dumb about its
> BDR> setting.
>
> BDR> You can't in general ask the device, as there might be
> BDR> no device open and you need to know what the device
> BDR> that would automatically opened will do. And you don't
> BDR> want to open it, as it might not be needed. Allowing
> BDR> devices to say by name that they will be interactive is
> BDR> the only way anyone has come up with on this so far.
>
> I agree (particularly about the very logical reason above).
> But I tend to agree with Deepayan, that
> we should give the useR / programmeR a way to just add a name to
> that list (well "readably", i.e. with a selfexplainable function
> call).
You meam as in
o dev.interactive() regards devices with the displaylist enabled
as interactive, and packages can register the names of their
devices as interactive via deviceIsInteractive().
?
> Even for Cairo, the useR can add "cairo" to that
> list when she knows that cairo will be called in X11-mode; or
> maybe the cairo "initialization/setup" code code do that
> automatically when it's loaded..
>
> Martin
>
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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