[ESS-bugs] ESS 13.09-1 with old R versions fails pretty badly
Vitalie Spinu
spinuvit at gmail.com
Wed Oct 30 21:22:44 CET 2013
>>> Martin Maechler on Wed, 30 Oct 2013 09:57:59 +0100 wrote:
[...]
> and sorry, but I've come to the conclusion that I very strongly
> would like us to revert from ESSR package to the way ESS 13.09
> worked.
Let's do that, but with a notable difference. See below.
[...]
> The advantage of having such non-repository package over what
> we've had in 13.09 seems really small to me,
> - speed in loading, once the package is installed for the correct version of R
> - (one help page which still has to be complemented by ESS documentation)
> compared to the added brittleness and non-robustness in the
> whole setup.
Actually, the main reason was to make it work on remote
machines. Injecting long code thorough emacs shell is very
unreliable. Otherwise I would definitely not have started the revamp. I
elaborated on this problem on ess-help recently.
[...]
> Yes, I feel bad about this; I've spent my several hours yesterday
> that are mostly lost, but of course Vitalie, you've spent more than
> me on this. But I strongly believe we save ourselves and even more
> our users much hair tearing in the future if we keep this as simple
> as we did in ESS 13.09.
Yeh ... things happen. The work is not wasted, we can reuse most of it.
> The small speed loss (we are talking fractions of a second anyway),
> could be eliminated in the future by providing optional save()
> and load()ing of the ESSR code.
Let's do this, let's roll in our own simple version control system. Here
is the plan.
- Save ESSR environment into ESSR.rda and then attach on startup. This
should be instantious. So we solve the loading speed problem.
- On remotes we will download the binary image from a web location,
similarly to what we are doing now with ESSR<ver>.tar.gz. Then save it
in ~/.config/ESSR/ESSR.rda and ~/.config/ESSR/version. On next load we
check for "version" and re-download when outdated.
- If loading fails, for whatever reason, we use
ess--inject-code-from-file as we did in 13.09. This will assure that
the stuff works on very old R and if download failed.
This is almost identical to what we have now, it should not take more
than a couple of hours to adjust.
Martin, how far backward compatible save and load is? Can you please
check this part?
Vitalie
More information about the ESS-bugs
mailing list