Does ess (>= 5.3.10) now require R ?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the quick reply!

On 3 December 2008 at 18:35, Stephen Eglen wrote:
| Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
| 
| > understand at all; see http://bugs.debian.org/507510
| > 
| > Now someone dug a bit more and it appears that this is due to the test in 
| > ess-find-newest-R from essd-r.el --- but I am not enough of an elisper to see
| > if that is or is not fault-tolerant to R being present.
| > 
| 
| 
| 
| I wrote that code, so can check whether it is fault-tolerant to no R.
| If it is not fault-tolerant, it should be, and so I will try and fix it
| - but won't be able to look at this for a day or two.

Thanks a bunch for checking.   I should probably detail that the bug gets
triggered on Debian when the 'source-equivalent' Debian package gets
installed by the user.  At that point, elisp code gets munged by every emacs
version present which could (currently) be emacs21, emacs22, emacs-snapshot.

The same thing happens again when the user install or upgrades his/her emacs
version(s).  

So this is equivalent to a configure test -- in corner cases folks could
indeed have emacs and ess but not R.  

| > Now, I can easily make Debian's ess depend on Debian's R -- should I ?
| No -- I think as ESS edits other types of file, I don't think r-base
| should be a prerequisite.  

Yup.  For all those stata and sas users on Debian ... ;-)

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.