buglet: peculiar icon appearing in OSX

[smartinsightsfromdata]

I'm using OSX El Capitan. When I run Zeppelin-With-R an icon with R appears in the dock. Very peculiar and mildly annoying (like the XQuarz icon, which appears as well).

Could it be eliminated?

[elbamos]

I have not been able to eliminate it. If you launch R from the command line, you should see the same icon. Whether it appears immediately or only after a graphics device is opened, seems to depend on R version. So it seems to be a consequence of something in XQuartz.

If you aren't seeing the same thing when you run R from the command line, let me know and I'll try harder to track this down.

[smartinsightsfromdata]

I tried to launch R from the command line but it doesn't appear just after simple arithmetic operation.

Only if I do plot(iris) I get both: XQuartz and R icons.

On the other hand if I use jupyter with the R kernel (IRkernel - which I thought you use), I do not get either.

[elbamos]

That doesn't surprise me. IRkernel is able to access R through a different method. That isn't available to rZeppelin because of licensing reasons -- we can't access R using the libR library, and we can't talk to R using Rserve or rjava, etc. So the remaining option is to use code forked from rscala, which opens up a new R instance by piping stdin and stderr through sockets. If you want to experiment with default graphics settings in R, that's the most likely path; I have not had any luck with that direction.

[elbamos]

That was a little vague... For clarity's sake: since Zeppelin is an apache project, we can't "link" to any code that's licensed under GPL2 or 3 unless it has a linking exception, and we also can't depend on any such code for the software to run. Since R and most R packages are GPL'd, that limits our options in terms of methods of communicating with R, and what packages are available.