setting up ess-source-directory

[A.J. Rossini]

>>>>> "BP" == Brett Presnell <presnell at stat.ufl.edu> writes:

    BP> The thing that really surprises me about this is that no one
    BP> else seems to complain about it (you're the first I know of
    BP> besides me).  I'm sure that this problem has existed for a
    BP> very long time (since the first time I tried ESS several years
    BP> ago), and I find that ESS is practically useless to me mainly
    BP> because of this one thing.  I still use S-mode 4.8mmxe2
    BP> whenever possible, though I would love to have a system that
    BP> interacted seemlessly with both S and R.

Nope, I complain about it, occassionally.  There is a solution, which
I'd have told you about, Brett, if you'd bothered to reply.

    BP> without first getting any one of them right.  For me
    BP> personally, and I suspect a lot of other people, ESS would be
    BP> much more useful if just the S and R stuff all worked as
    BP> expected (at least reliably reproduce the functionality of
    BP> S-mode under GNU Emacs on UNIX systems) and were reasonably

Right.  but the problem is that the packages I'm using it on tend to
be Stata (for data analysis), XLispStat, and R...  and I'm somewhat
altruistic, but not at the expense of features that I need...

Splus 5.1 is next on the list, for many, many reasons... (it's what
I'm currently focusing on...)

    BP> As long as I'm offering my unsolicited opinion, I'll add that
    BP> I personally think that supporting GNU Emacs 19.28 is beyond
    BP> the pale...

That's a can of worms!

    BP> Anyway, I don't mean any of this as a flame.

It's not, it's more "facts of life".  I wish we had more developers.
I'm out of time, being research-track and spending lots of time on
projects, then on things to publish, for the most part, and then
currently trying to find funding to spend on ESS (sacrifice short-term
gains for hopefully long-term support, but that's neither here nor
there...).

Since this has been brought up again, here is the short ToDo list for
ESS 5.2.  At _this_ point, we can consider dropping support for
(X)Emacs 19 (except for maybe 19.34).  ESS-core, feel free to comment, 
this list isn't set in stone:

#1 - Splus 5.1 needs to work.  Period.  Functionality needs to be
     fixed. 
#2 - Stata needs a few tweaks to get it to work correctly.
#3 - Rodney's new ESS-SAS code needs to be added in.
#4 - R needs to be certified as functional (see Mary's original point
     for an example of broken functionality).
#5 - Microsoft instructions.
#6 - update documentation.

As soon as this is done, ESS 5.2 gets released, and then we can start
working on things like dropping old support, "customize" in the sense
of Emacs, etc.  On the 5.2 Todo list:

#1 - customize.
#2 - speed up the literate programming interface.
#3 - disable object/variable completion when we can't do it.
#4 - audio interfaces with Emacspeak
#5 - func-menu/imenu support (It works for me, but isn't merged in).
#6 - more documentation

Timeline?  I don't know...

best,
-tony

-- 
A.J. Rossini		       Research Assistant Professor of Biostatistics 
Biostatistics/Univ. of Washington  (Th)	Box 357232   206-543-1044 (3286=fax)
Center for AIDS Research/HMC/UW	  (M/F)	Box 359931   206-731-3647 (3693=fax)
VTN/SCHARP/FHCRC		 (Tu/W)	Box 358080   206-667-7025 (4812=fax)
rossini@(biostat.washington.edu|u.washington.edu|hivnet.fhcrc.org)
http://www.biostat.washington.edu/~rossini

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