[R-SIG-Mac] rgl crashes R.app under El Capitan

[Fox, John]

Dear r-sig-mac list members,

The following reliably crashes R.app for R 3.2.2 under El Capitan (at least for me):

library(rgl)
demo("rgl") # press return a few times

My session info:

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)

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

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

other attached packages:
[1] rgl_0.95.1367

As far as I can tell, this problem occurs only in R.app, not when R is run from a terminal, nor in RStudio.

The problem was brought to my attention by José Conde (whom I've cc'd this message), who encountered the problem using the scatter3d() function from the car package through the Rcmdr GUI -- but the problem apparently isn't specific either to the Rcmdr or to scatter3d().

In the case of scatter3d(), the problem occurs only when displaying a regression surface, as in

scatter3d(prestige ~ income + education, data=Prestige)

but not in

scatter3d(prestige ~ income + education, data=Prestige, surface=FALSE)

I hope that this provides enough clues to resolve the problem.

Best,
 John
-----------------------------
John Fox, Professor
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8S 4M4
web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox