[Rd] weird bug with parallel, RSQlite and tcltk

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 13-01-03 6:20 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 5:59 AM, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Jan 3, 2013, at 10:32 , Karl Forner wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> The point is that I do not use tcltk, it gets loaded probably as a
>>> dependency of a dependency of a package.
>>> When I unload it all work perfectly fine. I just found it because one
>>> of my computer did not have tk8.5 installed, and did not exhibit the
>>> mentioned bug. So I really think something should be done about this.
>>> Maybe the "gui loop" should not be run a the the loading of the tcltk
>>> package, but
>>> at the first function ran, or something like this.
>>
>> Doesn't sound doable. It would be tricky to do and wouldn't help in the cases where people actually want to use the GUI - plus, it would leave a time bomb if you directly or indirectly fire up a Tk window (say, the CRAN menu from install.packages()).
>>
>
> Would it be possible to separate the tk and tcl portions of tcltk into
> two packages so that the tcltk package would be dependent on a new tcl
> package ?  From the viewpoint of a user of tcltk there would be no
> change but it would allow packages that only use tcl to declare a
> dependency only on that.
>
> By the way, tcl/tk 8.6 was released about 10 days ago with a ton of
> attractive new features and it would be nice to have it in the R
> windows build:
> http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.6.html

I think it's unlikely that we will upgrade.  The binaries available at 
that link do not have a license that would allow distribution with R, 
and we no longer have the facilities (specific compiler, time, etc.) to 
compile it ourselves.  I haven't tried myself, but my understanding is 
that the sources are not compatible with our compiler suite.

Duncan Murdoch