[R] Rcmdr X11 protocol error message

[John Fox]

Dear Peter and Michael,

I installed Quantian on  a spare machine that I have and observed the same
warning messages that Michael has been reporting. These (and the problem
with help files but not with viewing data sets that Peter reported) occurred
with version 0.9-11 of Rcmdr but not with an earlier version.

Since the code for the Rcmdr package was substantially reworked this summer,
that seems to me a good candidate for the source of these problems, though I
don't see why the changes should be problematic. I'm afraid that I'm
insufficiently familiar with the inner workings of X11 and Tcl/Tk to be much
help in figuring out what's wrong. Everything seems to work fine under
Windows, as far as I can tell.

It occurs to me that if the warning messages are benign, one approach would
be to suppress them. I already intercept warnings and present them in dialog
boxes; I could grep for "X11 protocol error" and simply ignore these. That
doesn't seem to me a good solution, however. It would be better to
understand what's happening.

I'm copying this message to Dirk since he's mentioned that he plans to put
the newer Rcmdr in Quantian. Dirk: Have you tested with Rcmdr 0.9-11?

Thank you.
 John



> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Peter Dalgaard
> Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 2:37 PM
> To: Michael Bibo
> Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] Rcmdr X11 protocol error message
> 
> Michael Bibo <mbibo at qldnet.com.au> writes:
> 
> > John Fox <jfox <at> mcmaster.ca> writes:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Dear Michael,
> > > 
> > > A question: Do you observe these problems with tcltk in 
> general or 
> > > just with the Rcmdr package? Is it possible for you to 
> test a Tcl/Tk 
> > > program outside of R?
> > > 
> > And Peter asked which version of Tcl/Tk.
> > 
> > Apparently my system has version 8.4 installed, specifically:
> > Tcl-8.4.5-3-mdk (tclsh8.4) and Tk-8.4.5-3-mdk (libtk8.4.so).  As I 
> > understand it, these are installed from RPMs on the 
> installation DVD, 
> > and I note that they are mandrake specific.
> > 
> > John - I wasn't sure if I had any other Tcl/Tk applications 
> installed 
> > (it's not always obvious when installing from RPM's).  I have 
> > certainly not encountered these error messages with any other 
> > application.  I quickly downloaded "WISH Supernotepad 1.2.3".  This 
> > application requires Tcl/Tk 8.4 or greater.  There are no graphics 
> > window in this application, but plenty of dialogue boxes.  
> It gave no errors.  Is this an appropriate test?
> > 
> > If this is a mandrake-configuration-specific problem, it may not be 
> > worth spending too much time investigating, as R Commandr 
> still works.  
> > I can always try re-installing Tcl/Tk from source when/if I 
> have time.
> 
> I don't think we have evidence that it's the Tcl 
> installation, although it could be (Google suggests that 
> there have been problems with at least some versions, 
> although most references seem rather old). I can't seem to 
> reproduce the effect with SUSE's tk-8.4.6-28 either. If it is 
> a bug in Rcmdr, then we'd want to find it and you have the 
> only handle on it....
> 
> BTW, sometimes Tk errors allow you to see a trace of the execution.
> Would this happen to be one of those situations?
> 
> -- 
>    O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
>   c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
>  (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: 
> (+45) 35327918
> ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: 
> (+45) 35327907
> 
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