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

[Richard M. Heiberger]

Martin wrote:
Rich:  What has been the problem on the Mac without 'make'?

The basic problem was that when I switched to Mac a year ago, ESS
stopped running smoothly.
Prior to that when I did an svn-update I would restart emacs on
Windows and all was well.
With the Mac various things didn't work.
versions was reported wrong,
I needed an
  unset EMACSLOADPATH
Once I started with make then I got stuck there.  the make created
.elc files which meant they took precedence over the newer svn-update .el files.

at this point I don't remember the full details.  I looked at the
following email threads
  svn won't make
  ... realeasing 12.09-1
  problem in ess-inf.el
  problem in 5408

They partially jogged my memory.  Maybe if you look at them they might
partially jog your memory
about what was causing me trouble.

My current behavior is to svn-update every so often and run the
incantation that seems to work.
Even so I still have an unexplained message at the end.  Things work
so I ignore it.  Nonetheless
here it is.  This is the set of shell commands from the *shell* buffer
on the Macintosh.  I elided
the outputs that look ok and show just the last successful one for
orientation and then the error
I don't understand.  This snippet is from 5823 a few days ago.

bash-3.2$ cd ~/WindowsC/HOME/rmh/ess-svn/
bash-3.2$ unset EMACSLOADPATH
bash-3.2$  make clean
bash-3.2$ make
....
[ess-s-l:] (def** ) only ...
enabling speedbar support
Cannot open doc string file
"/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/etc/DOC-22.1.1"
make[1]: *** [ess-custom.elc] Error 255
make: *** [all] Error 2
bash-3.2$

I am using
GNU Emacs 23.4.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin, NS apple-appkit-1038.36) of
2012-01-29 on bob.porkrind.org
from Vincent Goulet

My best guess right now is that new versions also had new file names
and therefore both old and new
filenames were in place and the wrong one was the ultimate source for
some function.
make clean
might help there.

The safest non-make solution is probably to checkout ESS into a new
directory, and not use svn-update.
Although I believe that does something strange about reporting the ess-version

But back to my question:
What features of ESS are available if I make ESS instead of just use
the checked out version out-of-the-box?