misbehaviour of some tk windows, R 2.6.0 on SUSE 10.1?

I don't know whether this is specific to (my installation 
of) SUSE 10.1, or is more general.  

With R 2.6.0, I am finding that some widgets made through 
the tcltk package are having problems which become evident 
through scrollbar activity.  An example is demo(tkfaq) -- 
see below.  To reproduce the problem, I do the following: 
after the tk window appears, hold down the "scroll-down" 
tab at the foot of the window for a few seconds, then 
release.  If scrolling stops (as it should, if all is 
working correctly), do the same thing again.  Repeating 
this 2 or 3 times usually results in uncontrolled 
(unstoppable) scrolling activity; and closing the window 
when that happens delivers the errors that appear in the 
transcript below.

My R 2.6.0 was built on my own system,

OS:  SUSE linux 10.1
tcl: 8.4.12-14
tk:  8.4.12-14
gcc: 4.1.0-25

Since I had not seen this behaviour with previous versions 
of R, I did a check with R 2.5.1: a fresh build today of R 
2.5.1 on the same system does not appear to have the same 
problem.

Any ideas?  Is anyone else seeing this behaviour?

David
  

----------------------------------------
david at blackbox2:~> R --vanilla

R version 2.6.0 (2007-10-03)
Copyright (C) 2007 The R Foundation for Statistical 
Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0

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 2.6.0 (2007-10-03) 
i686-pc-linux-gnu 

locale:
LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

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

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] rcompgen_0.1-15
  

library(tcltk)
    

Loading Tcl/Tk interface ... done
  

demo(tkfaq)
    

	demo(tkfaq)
	---- ~~~~~

Type  <Return>	 to start : 

  

require(tcltk) || stop("tcltk support is absent")
    

[1] TRUE

  

local({
    

+ 
+     tt <- tktoplevel()
+     tkwm.title(tt, "R FAQ")
+ #    Gave tiny font on some systems
+ #    txt <- tktext(tt, bg="white", font="courier")
+     txt <- tktext(tt, bg="white")
+     scr <- tkscrollbar(tt, repeatinterval=5,
+        .... [TRUNCATED] 
******************************************************
 The source for this demo can be found in the file:
 /home/david/lib/R/library/tcltk/demo/tkfaq.R 
******************************************************
  

Error in structure(.External("dotTclObjv", objv, PACKAGE 
    

= "tcltk"), class = "tclObj") : 
  [tcl] invalid command name ".1.1".

Error in structure(.External("dotTclObjv", objv, PACKAGE 
= "tcltk"), class = "tclObj") : 
  [tcl] invalid command name ".1.2".

Error in structure(.External("dotTclObjv", objv, PACKAGE 
= "tcltk"), class = "tclObj") : 
  [tcl] invalid command name ".1.2".

Error in structure(.External("dotTclObjv", objv, PACKAGE 
= "tcltk"), class = "tclObj") : 
  [tcl] invalid command name ".1.2".

Error in structure(.External("dotTclObjv", objv, PACKAGE 
= "tcltk"), class = "tclObj") : 
  [tcl] invalid command name ".1.2".

Error in structure(.External("dotTclObjv", objv, PACKAGE 
= "tcltk"), class = "tclObj") : 
  [tcl] invalid command name ".1.2".

  

David Firth wrote:
  

I don't know whether this is specific to (my installation 
of) SUSE 10.1, or is more general.  

With R 2.6.0, I am finding that some widgets made through 
the tcltk package are having problems which become evident 
through scrollbar activity.  An example is demo(tkfaq) -- 
see below.  To reproduce the problem, I do the following: 
after the tk window appears, hold down the "scroll-down" 
tab at the foot of the window for a few seconds, then 
release.  If scrolling stops (as it should, if all is 
working correctly), do the same thing again.  Repeating 
this 2 or 3 times usually results in uncontrolled 
(unstoppable) scrolling activity; and closing the window 
when that happens delivers the errors that appear in the 
transcript below.

My R 2.6.0 was built on my own system,

OS:  SUSE linux 10.1
tcl: 8.4.12-14
tk:  8.4.12-14
gcc: 4.1.0-25

Since I had not seen this behaviour with previous versions 
of R, I did a check with R 2.5.1: a fresh build today of R 
2.5.1 on the same system does not appear to have the same 
problem.

Any ideas?  Is anyone else seeing this behaviour?

David
  
    

Looks a bit nasty. I see it on SUSE 10.2 as well. Increasing the
repeatinterval setting for the scrollbar helps, but even at a setting of
50, I still see the effect. It is usually stoppable with the middle
button over the trough.
The error message is what you'd expect from killing a window while
something is trying to talk to widgets inside of it. The details of the
popup dialog is a little more informative:

    while executing
"$w cget -repeatinterval"
    (procedure "tk::ScrollSelect" line 12)
    invoked from within
"tk::ScrollSelect .3.2 arrow2 again"
    ("after" script)

I think there's a clue in there. It has the hallmarks of a race
condition: As I understand it the autorepeat feature runs an "after"
script which effectively presses the arrow again 5 ms later, invoking
another "after" script, etc. A button release is supposed to kill the
after script, but it might not do so in time, in which case it may try
to kill something that already died, etc.

Can't offhand see that we did anything to the event loop that could
cause this, though.
  

-----Original Message-----
From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org 
[mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Peter Dalgaard
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 4:32 PM
To: David Firth
Cc: r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [Rd] misbehaviour of some tk windows, R 2.6.0 on 
SUSE 10.1?

Peter Dalgaard wrote:

David Firth wrote:
  

I don't know whether this is specific to (my installation
of) SUSE 10.1, or is more general.  

With R 2.6.0, I am finding that some widgets made through 

the tcltk 

package are having problems which become evident through scrollbar 
activity.  An example is demo(tkfaq) -- see below.  To 

reproduce the 

problem, I do the following:
after the tk window appears, hold down the "scroll-down" 
tab at the foot of the window for a few seconds, then release.  If 
scrolling stops (as it should, if all is working 

correctly), do the 

same thing again.  Repeating this 2 or 3 times usually results in 
uncontrolled
(unstoppable) scrolling activity; and closing the window when that 
happens delivers the errors that appear in the transcript below.

My R 2.6.0 was built on my own system,

OS:  SUSE linux 10.1
tcl: 8.4.12-14
tk:  8.4.12-14
gcc: 4.1.0-25

Since I had not seen this behaviour with previous versions of R, I 
did a check with R 2.5.1: a fresh build today of R
2.5.1 on the same system does not appear to have the same problem.

Any ideas?  Is anyone else seeing this behaviour?

David
  
    

Looks a bit nasty. I see it on SUSE 10.2 as well. Increasing the 
repeatinterval setting for the scrollbar helps, but even at 

a setting 

of 50, I still see the effect. It is usually stoppable with 

the middle 

button over the trough.
The error message is what you'd expect from killing a window while 
something is trying to talk to widgets inside of it. The details of 
the popup dialog is a little more informative:

    while executing
"$w cget -repeatinterval"
    (procedure "tk::ScrollSelect" line 12)
    invoked from within
"tk::ScrollSelect .3.2 arrow2 again"
    ("after" script)

I think there's a clue in there. It has the hallmarks of a race
condition: As I understand it the autorepeat feature runs an "after"
script which effectively presses the arrow again 5 ms 

later, invoking 

another "after" script, etc. A button release is supposed 

to kill the 

after script, but it might not do so in time, in which case 

it may try 

to kill something that already died, etc.

Can't offhand see that we did anything to the event loop that could 
cause this, though.
  

Exactly the same behaviour on Fedora 7. Looping scrolling 
with 2.6.0+, no probs with 2.5.1.

Can probably eliminate OS issues and hardware then (2x3.2GHz, 
64 bit SUSE vs. 600MHz, 32bit Fedora).  Argh....

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             ?ster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark          Ph:  
(+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)                  FAX: 
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