[ESS] toggle between R versions

[Mark W Kimpel]

I"m trying to do it Martin's way because I like to keep my 
site-libraries separate from the R folders for ease of upgrade purposes. 
I know have both R-2.6.1 and R-devel on my PATH. From the shell, typing 
"R" gets me 2.6.1 because its first on my PATH; but from ESS now I can't 
get either R to start.

How can I customize emacs exec-path? From what I have read, it is 
initialized from the PATH variable.

Mark

Mark W. Kimpel MD  ** Neuroinformatics ** Dept. of Psychiatry
Indiana University School of Medicine

15032 Hunter Court, Westfield, IN  46074

(317) 490-5129 Work, & Mobile & VoiceMail
(317) 204-4202 Home (no voice mail please)

mwkimpel<at>gmail<dot>com

******************************************************************


Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> "RMH" == Richard M Heiberger <rmh at temple.edu>
>>>>>>     on Tue, 5 Feb 2008 23:57:18 -0500 writes:
> 
>     RMH> That is supposed to work on Linux with no further
>     RMH> intervention from the user.  Please reply to the list
>     RMH> with which versions of OS, emacs, ESS you are using.
>     RMH> Are you doing anything strange in your site-start.el or
>     RMH> .emacs file?  Where are the R files living?  Are they
>     RMH> in the default place for Linux distributions?  I am
>     RMH> very puzzled that Other/ doesn't contain at least three
>     RMH> items: R-newest, R-2.6.1, R-devel.  They are usually
>     RMH> placed on that menu automatically when ess-site is
>     RMH> started.
> 
>     RMH> Try manually entering
>     RMH> M-x R-devel
>     RMH> and let the list know if that was able to start the alternate version.
> 
> For all this to work, these versions of R must be in Mark's
> PATH when emacs is started, or, actually rather in
> Emacs'  exec-path variable at the time the ESS lisp code is
> loaded.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>     RMH> -----Original Message-----
>     RMH> From: Mark W Kimpel [mailto:mwkimpel at gmail.com] 
>     RMH> Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2008 11:40 PM
>     RMH> To: Richard M. Heiberger
>     RMH> Cc: ess-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
>     RMH> Subject: Re: [ESS] toggle between R versions
> 
>     RMH> Richard,
> 
>     RMH> This was the first thing I tried, but the only thing listed under 
>     RMH> "other" is "R-newest", which when I tried it, loaded R-2.6.1 just as "R" 
>     RMH> does. I am not using Windows, which may keep track of versions in the 
>     RMH> registry, but Linux, where I have to put a symbolic link to R in /usr/bin
> 
>     RMH> mark
> 
>     RMH> Mark W. Kimpel MD  ** Neuroinformatics ** Dept. of Psychiatry
>     RMH> Indiana University School of Medicine
> 
>     RMH> 15032 Hunter Court, Westfield, IN  46074
> 
>     RMH> (317) 490-5129 Work, & Mobile & VoiceMail
>     RMH> (317) 204-4202 Home (no voice mail please)
> 
>     RMH> mwkimpel<at>gmail<dot>com
> 
>     RMH> ******************************************************************
> 
> 
>     RMH> Richard M. Heiberger wrote:
>     >> When you are in a myfile.r buffer, click on the emacs menu item
>     >> ESS/Start Process/Other/
>     >> This will give you a list of all versions of R on your computer.
>     >> Click one of them and it will execute inside an *R* buffer.
>     >> 
>     >> -----Original Message-----
>     >> Behalf Of Mark W Kimpel
>     >> Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2008 11:11 PM
>     >> Subject: [ESS] toggle between R versions
>     >> 
>     >> I have both R-2.6.1 and R-devel installed on Ubuntu Gutsy, each with 
>     >> their own site-library, although currently I go into .Rprofile to 
>     >> manually change with site-library will be loaded. When starting R from 
>     >> within ESS-Emacs, I would like to be able to instruct which version I 
>     >> want to use. Is this possible?
> 
> yes. That's what Rich has been trying to help you with above
> 
>     >> For this to work, I would also need 
>     >> .Rprofile to detect the version of R and use the appropriate site-library.
> 
> that's the R part - maybe even more easy for you.. :
> I do similar things.
> If all the R versions you use are good enough to have getRversion(),
> then use that.
> The help  ?getRversion  contains this as part of its
> examples :
> 
>      if(getRversion() <= "2.5.0") { ## work around missing feature
>        cat("Your version of R, ", as.character(getRversion()),
>            ", is outdated.\n",
>            "Now trying to work around that ...\n", sep = "")
>      }
> 
> otherwise {for *old* versions of R}, you need 
>         RVersion <- paste(R.version$major, R.version$minor, sep=".")
> 
> *and* then must be more careful with the if(.) but
>       if(RVersion == "2.6.1") 
> will also work and most  '<=' or '>=' will work correctly as well
> 
>     >> 
>     >> Can all or any of this be done?
> 
> yes indeed
>