Is there a way to disable interactive behavior in R (?interactive), but
without it affecting the default error handling and reporting? This would be
needed to use Rserve without any interruption. The problem is that the
Rserve expects every eval either to return or return an error. The
connection gets stuck whenever R wants to display some kind of prompt.
For example, when the user runs install.packages for the first time and
doesn't supply the repos argument, R displays a list of CRAN mirrors. When
this happens, Rserve does not return; it just waits there, and the Rserv
connection becomes unattainable.
As a possible solution, we tried to disable R interactive mode (see
?interactive). The CRAN package 'interactivity' provides a function to
toggle C level global variable R_Interactive. However, setting interactive
mode to false, also results in that R exits the R session on every error.
This is not what we want, we would like to keep the R sesion alive and leave
the R error handling unaffected, and only suppress any prompts or dialogs
that prevent the call from returning.
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