[R] tcltk error on Linux

[Mark W Kimpel]

Seth and Brian,

Today and downloaded and installed the latest R-devel and tcltk now 
works. My suspicion is that Tcl was not on my path when R-devel was 
installed previously.

BTW, I had though that is was a courtesy to cc: the maintainers of a 
package when writing either R-devel or R-help about a specific package. 
For tcltk, I see:
Maintainer:    R Core Team <R-core at r-project.org>

If it is not appropriate to write R-core regarding packages they 
maintain, would it perhaps not be better to remove them as maintainers 
or, not suggest that people cc: maintainers of packages? Just an idea.

As for the suggestion that I not use R-devel, I do that because I 
sometimes use BioC packages that have just been published and are only 
available in the devel versions of BioC. Are you suggesting that only 
people who can debug things themselves, and thus who do not need to 
write to R-devel, use R-devel? As an open-source user, I thought the 
philosophy was that it was useful to have users willing to test beta 
versions of software and have those users report problems to developers. 
If that is not the case, please put a stronger warning on R-devel and 
warn users not to use it unless they are willing to "debug" and take 
care of all problems themselves.

Thanks,

Mark

---

Mark W. Kimpel MD  ** Neuroinformatics ** Dept. of Psychiatry
Indiana University School of Medicine

15032 Hunter Court, Westfield, IN  46074

(317) 490-5129 Work, & Mobile & VoiceMail
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Seth Falcon wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
>> On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, Mark W Kimpel wrote:
>>
>>> I am having trouble getting tcltk package to load on openSuse 10.2
>>> running R-devel. I have specifically put my /usr/share/tcl directory in
>>> my PATH, but R doesn't seem to see it. I also have installed tk on my
>>> system. Any ideas on what the problem is?
> 
> Any chance you are running R on a remote server using an ssh session?
> If that is the case, you may have an ssh/X11 config issue that
> prevents using tcl/tk from such a session.
> 
> Rerun the configure script for R and verify that tcl/tk support is
> listed in the summary.
> 
>>> Also, note that I have some warning messages on starting up R, not sure
>>> what they mean or if they are pertinent.
>> Those are coming from a Bioconductor package: again you must be using 
>> development versions with R-devel and those are not stable (last time I 
>> looked even Biobase would not install, and the packages change
>> daily).
> 
> BioC devel tracks R-devel, but not on a daily basis -- because R
> changes daily.  The recent issues with Biobase are a result of changes
> to R and have already been fixed.
> 
>> If you have all those packages in your startup, please don't -- there will 
>> be a considerable performance hit so only load them when you need
>> them.
> 
> Presumably, that's why they are there in the first place.  The warning
> messages are a problem and suggest some needed improvements to the
> methods packages.  These are being worked on.
> 
> + seth
>