[ESS] how to override site install of ESS?

[Ross Boylan]

On Mon, 2011-02-14 at 12:40 -0600, Rodney Sparapani wrote:
> On 02/14/11 11:57 AM, Scott Otterson wrote:
> > Yup, running
> >
> >     emacs --no-site-file
> >
> > does fix the ESS problem -- thanks!
> >
> > Unfortunately, this causes other problems because stuff the sysadmins expect
> > us to load is missing.  Is there another workaround?
> >
> > Thanks again,
> >
> > Scott
> 
> Yes.  Get the sysadmin off his butt to install the latest ESS version 
> :o)  Really, it's pretty painless now; 5 minutes or less.
> 
> Rodney
> 
I have a sort of  work around.  This is on Debian squeeze.
.emacs has
;use with --no-site
; must load new ess first to prevent system-wide one from loading
(load "~/ess-12.09-2/lisp/ess-site")
; next line gets the standard system setup
(load "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/debian-startup")

.bashrc has
# If running interactively, then:
if [ "$PS1" ]; then
    export EDITOR=emacs
    alias emacs='emacs --no-site'


I think debian-startup is the usual first step for site startup, at
least in the absence of actual code in the /etc/emacs/site-start.el.

The one problem I've run into is that when emacs is invoked by some
other process, e.g., svn commit, it still does site startup first and
produces a bunch of error messages.  Also, later commands in .emacs are
never executed.

Is
export EDITOR=emacs --no-site
legal (maybe in quotes)?  That might fix it.

I also tried
(unload-feature 'ess-site t)
but that didn't quite work; ess-version remained the old one.
Various other libraries depend on ess-site (e.g., 50ess.el), but I don't
think they are features and I couldn't figure out how to unload them.

Yes, I'll ask the sysadmin again.  I thought it would be easy to install
a personal copy of ess.  As you all already knew, it's not.

Ross