[R] Rcmdr, RODBC and XLConnect conflict cause R to crash

[John Fox]

Dear Jeremy,

I'm not sure why loading all three packages creates a problem, but I can explain how the Rcmdr uses each of the other two. 

RODBC is more general than XLConnect, in that it allows the Rcmdr to read dBase and Access files in addition to Excel files. On the other hand, RODBC cannot read these kinds of files under 64-bit R for Windows, only under 32-bit R. Consequently, when the Rcmdr runs under 64-bit R for Windows, it instead uses the XLConnect package to read Excel files (but cannot read dBase or Access files).

I'm not sure why you would have all three of these packages loaded at once. I consider (at least from the point of view of the Rcmdr), the RODBC and XLConnect packages to be alternatives, and the proper package will be loaded when the corresponding menu item is first invoked.

I hope this helps,
 John

------------------------------------------------
John Fox
Sen. William McMaster Prof. of Social Statistics
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/
	
On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 21:43:21 +0100
 Jeremy MAZET <jeremy.mazet at soredab.org> wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Since I upgraded R to the version 2.15.2, I have a strange problem which 
> implies XLConnect, RODBC and Rcmdr packages. 
> 
> - If the three packages are loaded in the same R session, the use of 
> RodbcConnect functions cause R to crash.
> - This crash occur only if Rcmdr is loaded. 
>  - If only one of the  RODBC or XLConnect package is loading with Rcmdr, 
> everything seems to be fine.
> 
> I reproduced the problem on several computers, always with the Windos XP 
> environement.
> 
> I hope someone could give me a piece of advice. 
> 
> Jérémy Mazet
> 
> > sessionInfo()
> R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26)
> Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)
> 
> locale:
> [1] LC_COLLATE=French_France.1252  LC_CTYPE=French_France.1252 
> [3] LC_MONETARY=French_France.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C 
> [5] LC_TIME=French_France.1252 
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] tcltk     stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods 
> [8] base 
> 
> other attached packages:
> [1] XLConnect_0.2-4     XLConnectJars_0.2-4 rJava_0.9-3 
> [4] RODBC_1.3-6         Rcmdr_1.9-2         car_2.0-15 
> [7] nnet_7.3-5          MASS_7.3-23 
> 
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>