[ESS-bugs] Bug#824527: ess (16.04-1) fails to install

[Lionel Henry]

My first intuition would be that there is no point in supporting old
Emacs versions as old ESS versions work on these anyway. I prefer the
scheme where ESS and Emacs are updated together, as if ESS was part of
Emacs. It's just less burden for the developers and it allows the
codebase to move forward while avoiding heaps of compat code. Also,
now that Emacs has a package manager, I don't think there is much
point in distribution-based packages. How are the two systems supposed
to interact?

That said, I recognise that it's an issue that Debian stable is still
based on Emacs 23. Does someone have any idea what it takes to support
Emacs 23? I wasn't even an Emacs user at that time, I started with
24.1 or 24.2 I think. I have no idea how the featureset/language
differs.

In any case we probably should completely drop Emacs 23 support
whenever we get the modularised ESS out.

Lionel


> On 17 mai 2016, at 23:32, Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
> 
> Only Kurt and Steven and I are on ess-debian at ..,   hence I'm forwarding this.
> 
> The bad news is that I'm currently no longer "easily" on ubuntu/debian
> and so I forgot to test emacs23.
> 
> In the past, I have been the one warning you guys when changes stopped
> working in emacs 23.
> 
> What do you think?  Should we try to get it working there?
> Martin
> 
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>
> Date: Tue, May 17, 2016 at 12:21 PM
> Subject: Re: Bug#824527: ess (16.04-1) fails to install
> To: 824527-forwarded at bugs.debian.org
> Cc: ess-debian <ess-debian at r-project.org>, Eric Chassande-Mottin
> <echassandemottin at gmail.com>
> 
> 
> 
> Martin et al,
> 
> On 17 May 2016 at 09:15, Eric Chassande-Mottin wrote:
> | Package: ess
> | Version: 16.04-1
> | Severity: important
> |
> | Dear Maintainer,
> |
> | the update of ess package leads to the following error.
> |
> | Best,
> | E.
> |
> |
> | Setting up ess (16.04-1) ...
> | Install emacsen-common for emacs23
> | emacsen-common: Handling install of emacsen flavor emacs23
> | Wrote /etc/emacs23/site-start.d/00debian-vars.elc
> | Wrote /usr/share/emacs23/site-lisp/debian-startup.elc
> | Install emacsen-common for emacs24
> | emacsen-common: Handling install of emacsen flavor emacs24
> | Wrote /etc/emacs24/site-start.d/00debian-vars.elc
> | Wrote /usr/share/emacs24/site-lisp/debian-startup.elc
> | Install ess for emacs23
> | install/ess: Handling install for emacsen flavor emacs23
> | ERROR: install script from ess package failed
> | dpkg: error processing package ess (--configure):
> |  subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
> 
> I can confirm the bug report by Eric, I saw it too -- and just uninstalled
> emacs23 on the affected system.
> 
> Something more robust would be nice.  Can you take a look and see why/how it
> fails?  Is there elisp code requiring emacs24?
> 
> In that case I could specify it in the package metadata and it simply would
> not install for emacs23 (but that is a blunt tool...)
> 
> Dirk
> 
> 
> | -- System Information:
> | Debian Release: stretch/sid
> |   APT prefers testing
> |   APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'unstable'), (100, 'stable')
> | Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
> | Foreign Architectures: i386
> |
> | Kernel: Linux 3.9-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
> | Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> | Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
> | Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)
> |
> | Versions of packages ess depends on:
> | ii  dpkg            1.18.7
> | ii  emacsen-common  2.0.8
> | ii  install-info    6.1.0.dfsg.1-6
> |
> | Versions of packages ess recommends:
> | ii  r-base-core  3.3.0-1
> |
> | Versions of packages ess suggests:
> | pn  jags       <none>
> | pn  julia      <none>
> | pn  pspp       <none>
> | pn  xlispstat  <none>
> |
> | -- no debconf information
> 
> --
> http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org
> 
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