Bug 1158425

It actually ended up being more nuanced than that. There are two issues at play here:

1) /usr/lib64/R/library/tcltk2 isn't part of core R. It's an addon, probably installed from CRAN, by you at some point when tcl was at 8.5. Then, I'm guessing you updated to f21 and got tcl and tk updated to 8.6, but R doesn't track dependencies on addons, hence, your oddity.

Upstream R advises that all addons should be rebuilt everytime anything they depend on changes. Including R. But there's not a good way to tell you that. :/

2) When I went to reproduce this issue, I hit an issue where my /usr/lib64/R/etc/Makeconf had hardcoded tcl8.5 and tk8.5 references in TCLTK_LIBS. This happened because I had /usr/lib64/R/etc/Makeconf marked as %config(noreplace). The idea here is that Makeconf is a config file that users can customize for their environment, and with "%config(noreplace)", when R updates, it leaves /usr/lib64/R/etc/Makeconf intact and puts the new file as /usr/lib64/R/etc/Makeconf.rpmnew.

Since this obviously causes issues when we need to update versioned libraries (I _think_ tcl and tk are the only possible culprits at the moment), I'm changing Makeconf to just be %config (this will backup the existing Makeconf file to Makeconf.rpmold and force the new one in). This ought to resolve any other tcl linking bugs.

When I applied that change locally and updated, I was able to successfully run your command on Fedora 21. An update is coming that fixes item 2.

R-3.1.2-1.el5 has been submitted as an update for Fedora EPEL 5.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/R-3.1.2-1.el5

rkward-0.6.1-10.fc20,rpy-2.3.10-3.fc20,R-3.1.2-1.fc20 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 20.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/rkward-0.6.1-10.fc20,rpy-2.3.10-3.fc20,R-3.1.2-1.fc20

R-3.1.2-1.el6 has been submitted as an update for Fedora EPEL 6.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/R-3.1.2-1.el6

rkward-0.6.2-1.fc21,rpy-2.4.4-1.fc21,R-3.1.2-1.fc21 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 21.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/rkward-0.6.2-1.fc21,rpy-2.4.4-1.fc21,R-3.1.2-1.fc21

rkward-0.6.1-10.fc19,rpy-2.3.10-3.fc19,R-3.1.2-1.fc19 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 19.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/rkward-0.6.1-10.fc19,rpy-2.3.10-3.fc19,R-3.1.2-1.fc19

R-3.1.2-1.el7 has been submitted as an update for Fedora EPEL 7.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/R-3.1.2-1.el7

Package rkward-0.6.2-1.fc21, rpy-2.4.4-1.fc21, R-3.1.2-1.fc21:
* should fix your issue,
* was pushed to the Fedora 21 testing repository,
* should be available at your local mirror within two days.
Update it with:
# su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing rkward-0.6.2-1.fc21 rpy-2.4.4-1.fc21 R-3.1.2-1.fc21'
as soon as you are able to.
Please go to the following url:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2014-14190/rkward-0.6.2-1.fc21,rpy-2.4.4-1.fc21,R-3.1.2-1.fc21
then log in and leave karma (feedback).

I have checked /usr/lib64/R/etc/Makeconf and it refers to 8.6. I have then deleted /usr/lib64/R/library/tcltk2 and did a fresh installation of tcltk2 from cran. Afterwards I tried to install RandomFields from cran again, but it still results in the same error:

error reading package index file /usr/lib64/R/library/tcltk2/tklibs/ttktheme_aquablue/pkgIndex.tcl: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)
error reading package index file /usr/lib64/R/library/tcltk2/tklibs/ttktheme_clearlooks/pkgIndex.tcl: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)

R-core-3.1.2-1.fc21.x86_64

Created attachment 954101 [details]
log of CRAN installing tcltk2 and RandomFields on fresh f21 x86_64 system

(In reply to Tom "spot" Callaway from comment #10)
> Created attachment 954101 [details]
> log of CRAN installing tcltk2 and RandomFields on fresh f21 x86_64 system

I can't reproduce your failure. I'm not sure what to try here.

Thanks for testing. I am going to re-check with a clean new install.

rkward-0.6.1-10.fc20, rpy-2.3.10-3.fc20, R-3.1.2-1.fc20 has been pushed to the Fedora 20 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

rkward-0.6.1-10.fc19, rpy-2.3.10-3.fc19, R-3.1.2-1.fc19 has been pushed to the Fedora 19 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

I was able to reproduce the problem. It only occurs when no X server is running (which is always the case here, as we do bootstrapping in chroot).

It's easy to reproduce by stopping the X server and running:

LANG=C /usr/bin/R --no-save --no-restore <<< 'install.packages("RandomFields", repos="http://cran.ch.r-project.org", dependencies=TRUE)'

from tty. As it's possibly related to the package itself, I contacted the original author. Thanks for taking care.

R-3.1.2-1.el6 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 6 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

R-3.1.2-1.el7 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 7 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

R-3.1.2-1.el5 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 5 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

rkward-0.6.2-1.fc21, rpy-2.4.4-1.fc21, R-3.1.2-1.fc21 has been pushed to the Fedora 21 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.