[ESS] Emacs won't start with ESS

[Gustavo Lacerda]

When it hangs, Ctrl-G doesn't work, and neither does ESC ESC ESC. The
menus don't drop down, and Emacs stops refreshing its graphics. I
always needed to close Emacs from outside. (This is what I meant by
"uninterruptibly")

Having said that, I would be willing to run a simple test, if you can
think of one.

Gustavo



On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Stephen Eglen
<S.J.Eglen at damtp.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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
>