[ESS] Emacs won't start with ESS

[Stephen Eglen]

Gustavo Lacerda <guse at optimizelife.com> wrote:


> My previous message (quoted below) still described the situation:
> Emacs gets stuck forever and uninterruptibly on "Finding all versions
> of R on your system...", except that I only seem to have 1 version of
> R running.

I wrote ths code, and although I developed it on linux, it should now
work on Windows (I think Rich helped with this).  It would be very
useful to find out why it is hanging for you,  and not for others.
The way to help us debug this would to be to put the following at the
top of your emacs, and then when you hit C-g you should get a backtrace
buffer; send us that, and it might help us see what was going on.

  (setq debug-on-quit t)  


> 
> So it came down to hacking  essd-r.el . I recognized that Emacs hangs
> somewhere inside 'ess-find-newest-R', and in particular this bit here:
> 
> (setq ess-newest-R
> 	    (ess-newest-r
> 	     (if ess-microsoft-p
> 		 ess-rterm-version-paths
> 	       (add-to-list 'ess-r-versions-created
> 			    inferior-R-program-name))))))
> 
> 
> Since this was a random issue, I waited until I got lucky and queried
> the value of the variable 'ess-newest-R', which for me was
> "c:/PROGRA~1/R/R-2.9.1/bin/Rterm.exe"
> 
> Then I modified the previous defvar as follows:
> 
> (defvar ess-newest-R "c:/PROGRA~1/R/R-2.9.1/bin/Rterm.exe")
> 
> Now ESS does not search for the newest R, which avoids the issue.
> 
> I hope that, this time around, I finally have a definitive solution. :-)
> 
> Gustavo