[Rd] tcltk and R

Gabor Grothendieck
2010-03-15T15:21:19Z

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?