[R-SIG-Mac] R-Tcl/Tk on MacOS X

[Jan de Leeuw]

The official R-1.9.x for OS X from CRAN or Stefano's
site requires the X11 version of Tcl/Tk. So you have
X11 widgets in your Tcl/Tk windows, while R is running
in R.app. You cannot get Quartz graphics from Terminal.app
or Emacs.app.

My unofficial R-devel on http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu/pub uses
Aqua Tcl/Tk. It uses  a rather nasty hack to provide Quartz
from Terminal.app and Emacs.app. You
cannot use packages such as tkrplot, which depends
explicitly on X11s. It also implies
that if you have a package that loads a
shared library into Tcl/Tk, then that shared library
should be a dynamic library and not a bundle
(that's the way Aqua Tcl/Tk is set up). It does not
work well with R running in R.app.

So, on balance, I think you should go with the
official X11 version and live with the ugliness
until R-core fixes the eventloop problem.

On Jun 29, 2004, at 3:50, James Wettenhall wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have an R-Tcl/Tk application and I do most of my testing on
> Windows and Linux, but I am presenting a workshop soon for which
> participants will need to install the software on their own
> laptops beforehand, and I may get some installation questions
> from MacOS X users.  I was just hoping to check on this list
> whether the strategy I used to install my R package and its
> requirements on MacOS X last year (with R 1.7.0) is still
> appropriate for 1.9.x.
>
> My main question is this:  Does the latest R for MacOS X
> work better with X11 Tcl/Tk than Aqua Tcl/Tk?  Or, put another
> way, is one easier to install than the other?  From memory, X11
> was preferred for 1.7.0 (the last R for OS X version I tried).
> My R-Tcl/Tk package requires the BWidget and TkTable extensions.
> BWidget contains only Tcl scripts (no shared libraries/compiled
> code) so it is very easy to install, but TkTable has a compiled
> shared library, so it is very important that users know whether
> they have an Aqua version (e.g. from TclTkAquaBI) or an X11
> version.  I have built an X11 version at:
> http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/limmaGUI/Tktable2.8MacOSX_X11.zip
>
> Best regards,
> James
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> R-SIG-Mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>
>
===
Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics;
Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical  
Software
US mail: 8130 Math Sciences Bldg, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554
phone (310)-825-9550;  fax (310)-206-5658;  email: deleeuw at stat.ucla.edu
homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu
   
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
-------------------------
           No matter where you go, there you are. --- Buckaroo Banzai
                    http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu/sounds/nomatter.au