R SIG Fedora - May 2012 - tcktk problem with custom R 2.15.0 build on RHEL5

Hi all,

Please bear with me because I'm not all that familiar with R. I manage a 
research cluster that's running Red Hat 5.6 (64-bit), and we recently 
installed version 2.15.0 of R for some users.  Here's how we built it:

./configure --prefix=/opt/shared/R/2.15.0 --with-tcltk --with-system-zlib
--with-system-bzlib --with-system-pcre --with-lapack --enable-R-shlib



When we ran "make check-all" it didn't report any obvious
problems, and
we successfully installed a number of add-on's from CRAN.  But when one 
of our users tries to use R with tcltk he runs into a problem:

R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
Copyright (C) 2012 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)
...

 > library("sqldf")
Loading required package: DBI
Loading required package: gsubfn
Loading required package: proto
Loading required namespace: tcltk
Loading Tcl/Tk interface ... done
Loading required package: chron
Loading required package: RSQLite
Loading required package: RSQLite.extfuns
 > result<-sqldf("select data.*, meth450part.chromStart as 
MethChromStart, meth450part.chromEnd as MethChromEnd, meth450part.strand 
as MethStrand, meth450part.name as MethName, meth450part.score as 
MethScore from data join meth450part where data.V1=meth450part.chrom and 
data.V2<=meth450part.chromStart and data.V3>=meth450part.chromEnd")
Loading required package: tcltk
Error in structure(.External("dotTcl", ..., PACKAGE =
"tcltk"), class =
"tclObj") :
   [tcl] unknown math function "min".

Can anybody tell me why we're getting this tcl error about the function 
"min" not being found?  I've been unable to find anything on the
web
that relates to this.  We're using version 8.14.3 of tcltk (the RedHat 
supplied packages).

Thanks,

-Bruce

On May 21, 2012, at 3:30 PM, Bruce Pennypacker wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Please bear with me because I'm not all that familiar with R. I manage
a research cluster that's running Red Hat 5.6 (64-bit), and we recently
installed version 2.15.0 of R for some users.  Here's how we built it:
> 
> ./configure --prefix=/opt/shared/R/2.15.0 --with-tcltk --with-system-zlib
--with-system-bzlib --with-system-pcre --with-lapack --enable-R-shlib
> 
> 
> 
> When we ran "make check-all" it didn't report any obvious
problems, and we successfully installed a number of add-on's from CRAN.  But
when one of our users tries to use R with tcltk he runs into a problem:
> 
> R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
> Copyright (C) 2012 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
> ISBN 3-900051-07-0
> Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)
> ...
> 
> > library("sqldf")
> Loading required package: DBI
> Loading required package: gsubfn
> Loading required package: proto
> Loading required namespace: tcltk
> Loading Tcl/Tk interface ... done
> Loading required package: chron
> Loading required package: RSQLite
> Loading required package: RSQLite.extfuns
> > result<-sqldf("select data.*, meth450part.chromStart as
MethChromStart, meth450part.chromEnd as MethChromEnd, meth450part.strand as
MethStrand, meth450part.name as MethName, meth450part.score as MethScore from
data join meth450part where data.V1=meth450part.chrom and
data.V2<=meth450part.chromStart and data.V3>=meth450part.chromEnd")
> Loading required package: tcltk
> Error in structure(.External("dotTcl", ..., PACKAGE =
"tcltk"), class = "tclObj") :
>  [tcl] unknown math function "min".
> 
> Can anybody tell me why we're getting this tcl error about the function
"min" not being found?  I've been unable to find anything on the
web that relates to this.  We're using version 8.14.3 of tcltk (the RedHat
supplied packages).
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Bruce

What does:

  capabilities("tcltk")

show? 

It should return TRUE if all is generally well. If it does come back TRUE, check
the output of:

  capabilities()

to see if anything else comes back as FALSE.

Since you installed from source rather than using the pre-built binary R RPM
available for RHEL from the EPEL (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL):

  http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/repoview/R.html

you may be missing the required '-devel' RPMs that contain the header
files for tcl/tk. I would have thought that you might have gotten errors from
'config' if that were the case, but perhaps they were missed?

Regards,

Marc Schwartz