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

[Fox, John]

Dear r-sig-mac list members,

I can reliably crash R.app in R 3.2.2 under El Capitan with

  library(rgl)
  demo("rgl")  # a few returns

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

I see this problem only in R.app, not when R is run in a terminal or in RStudio.

This problem was original brought to my attention by Jose Conde (to whom I'm cc'ing this message), who encountered the problem using the scatter3d() function in the car package via the Rcmdr, but the problem isn't unique to either scatter3d() or the Rcmdr. In the case of scatter3d() the command

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

which draws a regression surface, reliably crashes R.app, but

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

which plots only points (as spheres) doesn't.

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

John

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