[ESS-bugs] ESS 13.09-1 with old R versions fails pretty badly

[Rodney Sparapani]

On 10/28/2013 03:47 PM, Vitalie Spinu wrote:
> Versions older than 2.8 will probably not work correctly because of the
> lack of completion or name-space support. Users (developers) who
> occasionally want to load such an old R will have to do it in terminal
> or emacs shell or whatever.
>
>   > I think we need a workaround for old R versions such that a bit more
>   > things work than now...
>
> Sorry, but I have no time, nor desire, to work on that for the same
> reason I don't work on emacs 22 compatibility. If anybody is willing to
> contribute that feature, no problem on my side. But remember that it
> might get quite stuffy.
>
> We probably should add a note to the next release that R older than 2.8
> is not supported.
>
>     Vitalie

Hi Gang:

Well, old R worked with old ESS (and old emacs).  Is there some
way that we could gracefully fall back to an earlier version of ESS?
For example, I was just thinking that we could have older versions
installed as so:
Path                                   ESS Version
$PREFIX/share/emacs/site-lisp/ess         Current
$PREFIX/share/emacs/site-lisp/ess/12.03   12.03
$PREFIX/share/emacs/site-lisp/ess/5.13     5.13
etc.

OS X does something like this for installing R.  But, this would take
a bit of planning and hacking.
-- 
Rodney Sparapani, PhD
Manager of Statistical & Computational Operations
Center for Patient Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR)
Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), Milwaukee, USA
http://www.linkedin.com/in/rodneysparapani