Updates on working towards a new Debian package for ess

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Gents,

Martin suggested I post here on our brand-new spanking list rather than
continuing the CC'ed posts...

First off, I prepared a first package closing all bugs but the one that is
truly upstream.  If you could, please try it from

      http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/tmp/ess_5.3.7-1_all.deb

and a glance at my weblogs tells me that Martin already has it.

I just thought it would be a good idea to test this, this I just did, and
here are a few comments in increasing order of importance so keep reading to
the end :)

i)   Simple warning:  Upon install, we get a lot of messages to screen; some
     other packages now suppress those from postinst. Should we too?  Emacs22
     whines about

     [...]
     Wrote /usr/share/emacs22/site-lisp/ess/ess-help.elc
    
     In inferior-ess:
     ess-inf.el:140:19:Warning: `make-variable-buffer-local' should be called at
     toplevel
     Wrote /usr/share/emacs22/site-lisp/ess/ess-inf.elc
     [...]

     Same from msdos.elc

ii)  We called the package 5.3.7, it starts as 5.3.8 -- so I just committed a
     trivial fix to debian/changelog making it 5.3.8 in a minute.

iii) Worst one:  It doesn't start!!  While /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50ess.el
     has the bug fix supplied by Peter Galbraith, and still finishes in 
     (require 'ess-site)
     this seems to have no effect in emacs22 and emacs-snapshot. For both I
     needed M-x load-library ess-site RET before the familiar M-x R RET
     worked.

     Now, I am a total newb when it comes to writing .el files so I punting
     this one to you guys -- could someone gives this a cold hard look?  I am
     CCing Peter as I know that he has authored a number of useful emacs .el
     goodies for Debian system that I come to rely on here and there.

     @Peter:  If you want to join ess-debian, I'd be all for it as we'd get
     to increase the number of people able to upload .deb packages by 100% :)
     And we get the number of Debianers with a clue in elisp from 0 to 1
     which is even more important...

Cheers, Dirk

PS   emacs-snapshot rocks my world because of the Xft font goodness. It looks
     soooo much better.  I now use 
        (set-default-font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-10")
     and like it lot better than what we had before.  I use
        deb http://ron:9999/emacs.orebokech.com sid main
     for Debian and can't of the top of my head remember what I did on
     Ubuntu. I may have recompiled the package source from that site.
-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.