Returned to just R-sig-mac.
On Tue, 6 May 2008, Philippe Grosjean wrote:
Simon Urbanek wrote:
It turns out that the behavior of starting just Tcl was actually a bug.
Not completely. At least, loading of tcltk was correct when the "bug" was
there, but I totally agree that the mechanism used (according to the presence
or not of the DISPLAY variable is not the best one). It is not true that
there was no intention to allow loading tcltk without Tk. Otherwise, why
would you have this (tcltk.c, tcltk_init(), line 643 in the R 2.7.0 source):
warning(_("no DISPLAY variable so Tk is not available"));
This message strongly suggests that starting tcltk without Tk is allowed, and
'Tolerated' would be more accurate. It is there to cope with packages
that loaded tcltk during installation, which is often done headless.
The intention is that the package would load, not that it would do usefule
things.
The 'bug' was that this worked at all on MacOS --with-aqua builds. That
line was not intended to be used in that case. Simon did state that
clearly in his next para.
it also suggests the mechanism: by eliminating the DISPLAY environment
variable before starting tcltk. It is certainly undocumented, most probably
underused, and certainly requires a better way to specify that the user does
want to load Tk,... but at least, it worked for me up to now.
Apparently the intention was to attempt to start Tk regardless of the
DISPLAY variable, because some TclTk implementation such as Aqua Tcl/Tk
don't require DISPLAY and thus would not be loaded. Due to a bug (HAVE_AQUA
was not included in Rconfig.h before R 2.7.0), though, this was not the
case. I'll leave it to tcltk users/maintainers to decide the right way
forward. Essentially I see two options:
1) status quo: tcltk always attempts to load Tk and fails on an error
2) allow some (possibly cross-platform) way of specifying that it is ok to
not load Tk - essentially make failure to load Tk non-fatal.
I vote for the second option.
Only those who do the work have votes. There is another possibility, that
tcltk on MacOS always attempts to load Tk and warns on error.
Many thanks,
Philippe
Right now there is no (semantically correct) way to inhibit the loading of
Tk (DISPLAY is a sort of abuse and not a solution).
Cheers,
Simon
(CC to R-devel where this started...)
On May 5, 2008, at 9:12 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
Philippe,
I'm not quite sure why you are asking on a Mac list, but the error comes
from Tcl/Tk. I'd suggest asking on R-devel, the Tcl/Tk used in the R
binary is the same for R 2.6.x and 2.7.0 so it must be a change in tcltk.
Cheers,
Simon
On May 4, 2008, at 7:01 AM, Philippe Grosjean wrote:
Hello,
Up to R 2.6.2, I used to start Tcl *without Tk* (I need only Tcl for some
part of my work, like a socket server written in Tcl only, for instance)
with this code under Mac OS X (particularly on this system, because I
don't want to start X11 just to use Tcl code, which is required for Tk!):
> Sys.unsetenv("DISPLAY")
> library(tcltk)
I got then the message "no DISPLAY variable so Tk is not available", but
could work with Tcl without problems.
Now, with R 2.7.0, I got the following and Tcl failed to load:
Loading Tcl/Tk interface ... Error in fun(...) : no display name and no
$DISPLAY environment variable
Error : .onLoad failed in 'loadNamespace' for 'tcltk'
Error: package/namespace load failed for 'tcltk'
I try to locate the message "no display name and no $DISPLAY environment
variable" in the code but I cannot find it. Could someone help me please?
I understand that starting Tcl without Tk from R is not an intended
behaviour, but would it be possible to include an option to do so?
> sessionInfo()
R version 2.7.0 Patched (2008-04-22 r45460)
i386-apple-darwin8.10.1
locale:
en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
Many thanks,
Philippe Grosjean
--
..............................................<°}))><........
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( Prof. Philippe Grosjean
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
) ) ) ) ) Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium
( ( ( ( (
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