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

[Vitalie Spinu]

I am surprise that you are the guy who is proposing this. You just had
hard time figuring out one version on your PC. What will you do with
two? :P

BTW, we don't know when it started failing with very old
versions. Nobody is testing them anyhow. ESSR is recent but most of its
code was used for quite a while.


   Vitalie

 >>> Rodney Sparapani on Mon, 28 Oct 2013 17:28:28 -0500 wrote:

 > 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.