[R] Update problem? Rcmdr disappears, won't re-open

[G. Jay Kerns]

Dear Brian,

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Liviu Andronic <landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/2/10, briancady413 <briancady413 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>  I am trying unsuccessfully to open RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR from within Rcmdr, via
>>  the pulldown tools menu.
>>  It insists I restart Rcmdr, which I let happen, then Rcmdr doesn't restart,
>>  and then I can not restart it using R's package loading function either.
>>
> >From the output I am not sure what you are doing, but this might help.
> There is some strange incompatibility between Rcmdr.HH and
> Rcmdr.IPSUR. Loading them in the following order
> Rcmdr.IPSUR
> Rcmdr.HH
>
> will work. Inverting the order will make Commander() fail to restart.
> You might want to experiment this in an R --vanilla session.
>
> Liviu
>

I didn't see your sessionInfo and without it I am really stabbing in
the dark, but it could be related to a problem I first noticed on
October 20, 2008 and to which Liviu alluded above. I can generate a
problem similar to yours (confirmed on Debian and Windows) if I do the
following things, exactly in the following order.

1. load RcmdrPlugin.HH  either with library() or via the Rcmdr Tools
-> Plugin menu, then
2. load RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR via the Rcmdr Tools -> Plugin menu.

The cause seems to be related to the fact that RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR
removes the default Continuous/Discrete Distributions menus in their
entirety (and replaces them with IPSUR menus).  Since RcmdrPlugin.HH
has certain submenus within those removed menus, there is a conflict
between the added versus the subtracted.

Here are three workarounds to the above problem.

1) Do what Liviu suggested (thanks for pointing that out, Liviu).

2) Load RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR with the command

library(RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR)

and do not use the Tools -> Load Rcmdr Plugins menu.  This method
works every time, regardless of the order in which other packages were
loaded, and is what I recommend to my students.

3) Locate the folder RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR in your local library.  In the
subdirectory /etc/ you will find a file menus.txt.  Comment (or
delete) from that file the following line:

remove  continuousMenu  "" "" "" "" ""

Thanks to John Fox for tracking this down back then.

If you do method 3) then be warned that there will be a similar but
non-identical Continuous distributions menu under the main
Distributions menu.  Visit here to see the differences between them.

http://ipsur.r-forge.r-project.org/rcmdrplugin/features.php

In principle I could remove the offending line from the distributed
version of RcmdrPlugin.IPSUR but I have deliberately not done that
because A) it confuses students and B) John went to nonzero trouble to
make the "remove" capability functional; I think it's cool.

I will think about it some more.  Maybe there is a way to reorganize
it to not confuse students and simultaneously avoid conflicts with
other plugins.

If this doesn't help then I am at a loss without something else like a
sessionInfo().

Cheers,
Jay