On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 02:22:03PM -0400, Simon Urbanek wrote: > It turns out that the behavior of starting just Tcl was actually a bug. > Apparently the intention was to attempt to start Tk regardless of the > DISPLAY variable, because some TclTk implementation such as Aqua Tcl/Tk > don't require DISPLAY and thus would not be loaded. Due to a bug > (HAVE_AQUA was not included in Rconfig.h before R 2.7.0), though, this > was not the case. I'll leave it to tcltk users/maintainers to decide the > right way forward. Essentially I see two options: > > 1) status quo: tcltk always attempts to load Tk and fails on an error > 2) allow some (possibly cross-platform) way of specifying that it is ok > to not load Tk - essentially make failure to load Tk non-fatal. > > Right now there is no (semantically correct) way to inhibit the loading > of Tk (DISPLAY is a sort of abuse and not a solution).
FWIW this requirement was also biting Debian's automated builders in the tail. A hack remedy was to just remove tcltk from lazy-load. A slightly better fix is to run 'R CMD INSTALL ...' with a prefix of 'xvfb-run' which uses the virtual framebuffer x11 driver to make tcl/tk (or any other user of x11; I think gtk2 may fall in the same camp) happy whether or not the box is actually headless. Dirk -- Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
