[R-gui] "GUI locked" with Rcmdr

[John Fox]

Dear Dirk,

At 11:06 AM 5/18/2003 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

>I discussed this briefly with John Fox who cannot reproduce it on his RH
>system and suggested I raise the issue here to see if anybody else has the
>same or similar problem:
>
>- when I lauch the R Commander via 'library(Rcmdr)' in a normal interactive
>session, two things happen. I get the R prompt back, but it does not take
>any input whatsoever; only CTRL-c breaks this. The Commander GUI appears,
>but also refuses to take any input. The window manager cannot close the GUI,
>and I have to resort to xkill(1).  This is on Debian "testing" under KDE
>3.1.1 with the Debian testing version of R 1.7.0.
>
>- when do   echo "library(Rcmdr)" | R --slave   the Commander starts and
>exists.
>
>I fixed both problems in a three-line patch using Peter's usual trick of
>adding a global boolean variable, and to tkwait() for it.  John obviously
>saw no need for the patch as he cannot reproduce the problem.
>
>So:  anybody else having any weird tcltk / R / window manager interactions?
>Any idea what I could tweak or alter?

Thanks for posing this question on the list. Perhaps someone will respond 
with information that will help me to understand better what's going on.

By the way, I'm happy to add your patch to the code, and will do so for the 
version that I'll post to my web site soon. What was unclear to me is 
whether it's necessary to have calls to tkwait sprinkled through the code. 
I think that I understand now that the issue arises only with respect to 
the Commander window. (Is that correct?) Since my goal was to write a 
simple basic-stats GUI that works cross-platform, I do feel that it is 
important for it to work on common Linux distributions.

Thanks for your help,
  John

-----------------------------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M4
email: jfox at mcmaster.ca
phone: 905-525-9140x23604
web: www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox