[ESS-bugs] Debian bug #456001 'make-variable-buffer-local' ...

[Martin Maechler]

We (Kurt and I) have been e-talking with Debian/Ubuntu people,
notably  Dirk Eddelbuettel, about  (old) Debian bug report on
ESS.

In my view, of the dozen, there are two bug reports that are
still relevant,the first one  about  help(...) etc ... very much
related to my recent e-mail (to ESS-core) about ?foo, ??foo, etc

The 2nd one should be easier to fix  and I am asking here for advice:

If I go ino  <ess>/lisp/ and  --- {with 'emacs' == Emacs-22.x !}

rm ess-inf.elc
make ess-inf.elc
 
I get 
---------------------------------------------------------

..............
..............

In inferior-ess:
ess-inf.el:140:19:Warning: `make-variable-buffer-local' should be called at
    toplevel

---------------------------------------------------------

and the code there is inside  (defun inferior-ess ....)
marked with '>>' :

---------------------------------------------------------------
    (save-excursion

      [..]

>>      ;; Hack to work around the following "default" (global) setting of vars:
>>      ;; make sure our comint-... hack doesn't affect anything else
>>      (make-variable-buffer-local 'comint-use-prompt-regexp-instead-of-fields)

      ;; now the abomination:
      (ess-setq-vars-default ess-customize-alist)
---------------------------------------------------------------

When I read the help on (make-variable-buffer-local)
it suggests that

  >> In most cases it is better to use `make-local-variable',
  >> which makes a variable local in just one buffer.

and I do wonder what we should really do.

Martin