[ESS-bugs] ess won't load in emacs-29.3 on Fedora 39

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Jon Baron 
>>>>>     on Mon, 29 Apr 2024 15:02:35 -0400 writes:

    > After upgrading from Fedora 38 to 39, ess stopped
    > working. Most recently I put all the .el and .elc files in
    > .emacs.d/lisp/ (which contains other things that work
    > fine). If I then put the following single line in my
    > .emacs file, I get an error:

    > (require 'ess-r-mode)

    > The first thing I see is

    > Wrong type argument: stringp, nil

    > and a recommendation to try emacs --debug-init

    > When I ran emacs emacs --debug-init I got the following:

    > ################# begin quote Debugger entered--Lisp
    > error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil)
    > file-directory-p(nil)
    > byte-code("\302\303\304\305\306\307\310\311\310\312&\11\210\302\313\304\314\306\303\315\316&\7\210\302\317\304\320\306\303\315\316&\7\210\302\321\304\322\306\303\315\316&\7\210\302\323\304\324..."
    > [ess-lisp-directory ess-etc-directory custom-declare-group
.......................

This reminds me of problems I've seen in a similar system when
"we" updated to emacs 29.3 .
I eventually solved most most problems, notably the ESS ones, by
deleting "all" (at least many) *.elc files  ... which in my case
where from Emacs 28.3  and did not work correctly in Emacs 29.3.

Also re-installing all (or many of) the elpa/melpa packages,
notably also the poly-R releated ones {{you need for *.Rmd files etc}}.

Martin