[Rd] misbehaviour of some tk windows, R 2.6.0 on SUSE 10.1?

[John Fox]

Dear Peter and David,

For what it's worth, I observe this behaviour after upgrading to R 2.6.0
under Ubuntu 7.04. When David previously reported the problem to me, I
tested on R 2.5.1 (again with Ubuntu 7.04) and did not observe the problem.

Regards,
 John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org 
> [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Peter Dalgaard
> Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 4:32 PM
> To: David Firth
> Cc: r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [Rd] misbehaviour of some tk windows, R 2.6.0 on 
> SUSE 10.1?
> 
> Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> > David Firth wrote:
> >   
> >> I don't know whether this is specific to (my installation
> >> of) SUSE 10.1, or is more general.  
> >>
> >> With R 2.6.0, I am finding that some widgets made through 
> the tcltk 
> >> package are having problems which become evident through scrollbar 
> >> activity.  An example is demo(tkfaq) -- see below.  To 
> reproduce the 
> >> problem, I do the following:
> >> after the tk window appears, hold down the "scroll-down" 
> >> tab at the foot of the window for a few seconds, then release.  If 
> >> scrolling stops (as it should, if all is working 
> correctly), do the 
> >> same thing again.  Repeating this 2 or 3 times usually results in 
> >> uncontrolled
> >> (unstoppable) scrolling activity; and closing the window when that 
> >> happens delivers the errors that appear in the transcript below.
> >>
> >> My R 2.6.0 was built on my own system,
> >>
> >> OS:  SUSE linux 10.1
> >> tcl: 8.4.12-14
> >> tk:  8.4.12-14
> >> gcc: 4.1.0-25
> >>
> >> Since I had not seen this behaviour with previous versions of R, I 
> >> did a check with R 2.5.1: a fresh build today of R
> >> 2.5.1 on the same system does not appear to have the same problem.
> >>
> >> Any ideas?  Is anyone else seeing this behaviour?
> >>
> >> David
> >>   
> >>     
> >
> > Looks a bit nasty. I see it on SUSE 10.2 as well. Increasing the 
> > repeatinterval setting for the scrollbar helps, but even at 
> a setting 
> > of 50, I still see the effect. It is usually stoppable with 
> the middle 
> > button over the trough.
> > The error message is what you'd expect from killing a window while 
> > something is trying to talk to widgets inside of it. The details of 
> > the popup dialog is a little more informative:
> >
> >     while executing
> > "$w cget -repeatinterval"
> >     (procedure "tk::ScrollSelect" line 12)
> >     invoked from within
> > "tk::ScrollSelect .3.2 arrow2 again"
> >     ("after" script)
> >
> > I think there's a clue in there. It has the hallmarks of a race
> > condition: As I understand it the autorepeat feature runs an "after"
> > script which effectively presses the arrow again 5 ms 
> later, invoking 
> > another "after" script, etc. A button release is supposed 
> to kill the 
> > after script, but it might not do so in time, in which case 
> it may try 
> > to kill something that already died, etc.
> >
> > Can't offhand see that we did anything to the event loop that could 
> > cause this, though.
> >   
> Exactly the same behaviour on Fedora 7. Looping scrolling 
> with 2.6.0+, no probs with 2.5.1.
> 
> Can probably eliminate OS issues and hardware then (2x3.2GHz, 
> 64 bit SUSE vs. 600MHz, 32bit Fedora).  Argh....
> 
> -- 
>    O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
>   c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
>  (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark          Ph:  
> (+45) 35327918
> ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)                  FAX: 
> (+45) 35327907
> 
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