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tcltk and R

3 messages · Gabor Grothendieck, Peter Dalgaard, Roger D. Peng

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I have had some comments on sqldf regarding its dependence on tcltk
such as the second last sentence on this blog post:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://www.wentrue.net/blog/%3Fp%3D453&prev=http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch%3Fhl%3Den%26ie%3DUTF-8%26q%3Dsqldf%26lr%3D%26sa%3DN%26start%3D10

sqldf does not directly use tcltk but it does use strapply in gsubfn
for its parsing and strapply uses tcl from the tcltk package to it
speed up -- there is also an all R version of strapply but the gsubfn
package as a whole still depends on tcltk whether or not the user uses
tcltk or not.    I was thinking of changing the Depends:tcltk of
gsubfn to Suggests:tcltk and then checking for tcltk availability at
run time so if not available it would use the slower all R version;
however, I was under the impression that all R platforms have a
distribution of R that includes tcltk so in principle this should not
be necessary.

Is that right regarding tcltk availability on various platforms?  What
is the situation here?
#
Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
Hmm, judging by the Mac situation, I wouldn't count on it. We have tcltk
working on all the major platforms, but we do allow for compilation
without it (e.g. for compute servers), and at least in the Mac case, we
need to use a suboptimal version because of the event loop battle. If
Apple didn't support X11 (well, sort of), we'd be without Tk there.

(We do, byt the way, handle the case where the display is absent, but
there really ought to be a neater way to load Tcl without Tk.)
#
R can be built without tcl/tk and so I think it would still be good to
check at runtime.

-roger

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Gabor Grothendieck
<ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote: