[ESS] ESS, install.packages() in R, and Windows

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Henric" == Henric Nilsson <henric.nilsson at statisticon.se>
>>>>>     on Mon, 19 Dec 2005 17:02:20 +0100 (CET) writes:

    Henric> On Må, 2005-12-19, 16:11, A.J. Rossini skrev:

    >> This sounds like a library loading issue -- does it happen with Rterm
    >> outside of ESS?  If so, it's an R bug.  Otherwise, perhaps we should
    >> just "library(tcltk")" on starting up ESS/R on Microsoft as
    >> initialization code.   (or "windows()").
    >> 
    >> Are you sure that tcltk isn't needed?  Aren't those GUI windows tcltk
    >> based, or are they merely non-tk Microsoft windows?

    Henric> BTW, notice that `install.packages()' will work in ESS if you
    Henric> `chooseCRANmirror(graphics = FALSE)' first. This doesn't even open a
    Henric> window device, but seems to initialize whatever it is that needs to be
    Henric> initialized.

Yes.  But we'd like to find and solve the root problem.

I'm pretty sure you can reproduce the problem by calling  chooseCRANmirror()
directly {which is called from  contrib.url(c(CRAN = "@CRAN@"))
	  after  'flush.console()' }
and this itself calls  menu(*, graphics = TRUE)
and menu() checks internally if it's in an appropriate
environment and when it is, it tries to use a graphical menu,
otherwise a text one.

The most simple way to reproduce the problem will probably be
    select.list(LETTERS[1:7])

which --- on windows Rgui (or on the Mac) --- tries to open a
graphical list-box widget, and which would not work inside ESS
in Windows Rgui.  Can you confirm?

Martin