[ESS] setting transcript file name

[Vaidotas Zemlys]

Hi,

First of all, thank you for your informative answers.

> 
> Hmm, I have never heard of such a wish, and in all my "teaching"
> about ESS I'd rather encourage people to work with 'scripts'
> (*.R) rather than 'transcripts' (*.Rt or *.Rout).
> 
> But then, ESS has always been supporting (at least) two kinds of
> work habits.  For Vaidotas' habits this will be worth
> {but then I still think he should change them :-) }
>
I always work with scripts and not with transcripts, so my habbits are
good:) I need a transcript file for backup and correspondence
purposes. That's why the strange name directory-date. This way I will
have all my day's work saved in transcript file and thus I can keep
track of what I've accomplished.  I already try to practice all good
advices as separate projects in separate directories, working with
scripts and etc. I also use svn for tracking version of my script
files, and recently began tracking .RData and .Rhistory files, yet
this is still not enough, since sometimes I need not only what
commands I used in R prompt, but also what output they produced. 
Having transcript file, .Rhistory, .RData and script files you get
pretty complete view, of your days work, which you can send to a
colleague to inspect, or create a timesheet and charge your boss
appropriate amount of money:)

 
>     StEgl> (& is there an easier way to get the name of the current directory?)
> 
> I think default-directory is quite desirable, but don't know for sure.
> To get the `basename' of that directory  however, I'd use
> 
>   (file-name-nondirectory (expand-file-name default-directory))
> 
> This would also bypass the use of (split-string ..) which does
> not accept an  'omit-null argument in my versions of Emacs
> (21.3, 21.4).

So as far as I understood from Martin's and Stephen's letters, in
order to get my desired behaviour you have to change ess code
directly, namely ess-inf.el file in function inferior-ess, you can't
change the default behaviour by putting something in your .emacs file,
am I right?

Another thing, now if you provide transcript name when
ess-ask-about-transfile is on, the buffer is set to read only, is this
a bug? I notice this with emacs 21.4a-1 and ess  5.2.6-1 on Debian Sid
(upgraded before sarge), and emacs  21.3+1-8ubuntu  and  ess 5.2.3-3
on Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog.

Thanks again for your help.

Vaidotas Zemlys