I've spent the past several days figuring out how to package Rcmdr so  
that it can be easily installed by students who are novices to R and  
have Mac OS X machines, when I stumbled on a nasty little interplay  
between R.app, Rcmdr, and saved workspaces. Specifically, if you save  
a workspace during a session in which you have worked with Rcmdr,  
quit that session, start a new R session using that same workspace  
through R.app, and then load Rcmdr, what happens is that the main  
Rcmdr window comes up, but it does not respond to any user actions.  
To test things further, I quit R, started a new R session, loaded the  
tcltk library, and typed demo(tkdensity). In this case, the quartz()  
device with the initial distribution appears, but the Tk widget does  
not. I then quit R, started an xterm session with R.framework  
directly (bypassing R.app), and found that Rcmdr loads properly, and  
takes user input. Of course, rgl does not work under this  
configuration. I am working with the CRAN 2.2.1 release of R and all  
the most current available support packages (including rgl) on CRAN  
that Rcmdr needs. The version of Rcmdr is Rcmdr 1.1-5, which is a bit  
odd since the current development release that John Fox has put out  
is Rcmdr 1.1-3.

Again the steps to trigger an instance of the bug are:

(1) Start an R session with R.app.
(2) Install all needed packages for Rcmdr and Rcmdr itself.
(3) Start Rcmdr via the library(Rcmdr) command.
(4)Play with pulldown menus to convince yourself Rcmdr is alive.
(5) Use the pulldown menu sequence File -> Exit -> From Commander to  
close Rcmdr.
(6) Quit the session, saving the workspace on exit.
(7) Start a new R session with R.app.
(8) Start Rcmdr and play with the pulldown menus to convince yourself  
that Rcmdr is now dead.
(9) At this point you can't gracefully quit from Rcmdr, so just quit  
from R to get rid of the window.

Sorry for the length of the post.

Dan


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

