[R-SIG-Mac] tcltk not loading and causes R-gui to become unresponsive or crash

[Jake Price]

Hi,

I've run into a problem with getting tcltk to run properly on r-gui. It's a
required package for one of the packages I'd like to work with and I
thought it would be good to report the issue to you guys. Hopefully this is
something that's an easy fix or already known. I've outlined my
observations in the email below, trying to be as detailed as I can.

Best regards,

JP

------------------

Preliminary Stuff
13" Macbook Air
OSX Yosemite - Version 10.10.5
R Version 3.2.3
R.app GUI 1.66 (6956) x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0

r and r-gui were installed via homebrew

------------------

I installed aplpack in order to use the bagplot function. Upon loading the
package I received the following output:

Loading required package: tcltk
2015-12-23 09:44:11.134 R[6529:31353] -[NSApplication _setup:]:
unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x60800011b3f0
2015-12-23 09:44:11.135 R[6529:31353] *** run_REngineRmainloop: exception
-[NSApplication _setup:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance
0x60800011b3f0 caught during REPL iteration. Update to the latest GUI
version and consider reporting this properly (see FAQ) if it persists and
is not known.
Consider saving your work soon in case this develops into a problem.

The session became unresponsive and I had to force quit.

To try and solve the problem, I checked to see if tcltk was installed:

> capabilities()["tcltk"]
tcltk
 TRUE

It was also available via the package manager but trying to load it, both
through the gui and using library("tcltk") caused R to become unresponsive
and resulted in an identical error:

2015-12-23 09:49:24.370 R[6571:33844] -[NSApplication _setup:]:
unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x608000108f70
2015-12-23 09:49:24.370 R[6571:33844] *** run_REngineRmainloop: exception
-[NSApplication _setup:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance
0x608000108f70 caught during REPL iteration. Update to the latest GUI
version and consider reporting this properly (see FAQ) if it persists and
is not known.
Consider saving your work soon in case this develops into a problem.

Some googling led me to do the following:

- uninstall r-gui via homebrew
- uninstall r via homebrew
- download and install the most recent version of xquartz
- installed homebrew/dupes/tcl-tk (which I thought was supposed to fix the
issue)
- ran brew update
- ran brew upgrade
- ran brew doctor
- installed r via homebrew
- installed r-gui via homebrew

After taking the above steps, I'm still running into the same issue as
before.
Here is the output of sessionInfo():

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

Following the advice in the Mac OSX FAQ (to attempt to replicate the
issue), I opened the r in terminal and was able to not only load tcltk, but
also aplpack:

R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10) -- "Wooden Christmas-Tree"
Copyright (C) 2015 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0 (64-bit)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

  Natural language support but running in an English locale

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.

Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
> library("aplpack")
Loading required package: tcltk
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] tcltk     stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods
[8] base

other attached packages:
[1] aplpack_1.3.0


I believe that the issue with loading tcltk is interfering with loading
aplpack and that something in R.app/r-gui is not playing nicely with tcltk.

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