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

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Vitalie Spinu <spinuvit at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Mon, 28 Oct 2013 17:02:24 -0700 writes:

    > 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.

Hmm, I'm not nobody.

As Rodney said, ESS has worked flawlessly with R versions as old
as R 1.0.0 and earlier {yes, I still have some of them working
in Linux here at work} :

  R-0.16.1 

  R : Copyright 1997, Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka
  Version 0.16.1 -- + MM� patches  (Released: February 11, 1997)

  R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
  You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
  Type "license()" for details.

and as one of the first R Core members I indeed have an
interest in seeing old versions work, and sometimes the public
can profit from that.

All I was asking was a much better workaround to the current setting.
Naming the tarball without a version was not useful, as I said.
Of course I am willing to do many of the necessary changes,
but I need your collaboration with that.

Martin


    >>>> 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.