[ESS] ess-remote trouble

[Stephen Eglen]

> I really like the idea of ess-remote, and I want to start using it
> routinely.  Unfortunately with my current set-up the remote session
> buffer invariably eventually ends up with an inactive prompt[1]. I haven't
> noticed any particular pattern in when this happens (but so far I have
> always got several minutes of correct functioning before it fails).
> 
> The steps I'm using are:
> 
> 1. M-x shell (on machine running ubuntu 9.10)
> 2. ssh remote machine (fedora 10)
> 3. R
> 4. ess-remote
> 5. r
> 6. ...
> 
> I'm afraid I haven't yet managed to collect any helpful debugging
> info. I tried using ssh -v and monitoring stderr but nothing relevant
> appeared. Also nothing relevant in *Messages*. I don't have any problems
> maintaining gnome-terminal bash ssh sessions open on the remote machine,
> and as far as I know not with M-x shell ssh, although that's not
> something I do often.
> 
> So at the moment I'd like to ask: Does anyone have any idea what's going
> wrong? Is anyone else having similar problems? How should I debug
> this?

I recently (a few weeks ago) patched ess-remote as I found it wasn't
working for me, with steps similar to yours (omiting the 'ssh machine'
step).

2010-01-18  Stephen Eglen  <stephen at gnu.org>

	* essd-els.el (ess-remote): Use `ess-current-process-name' as the
	local process name if none passed to ess-remote.

Are you able to test a new version of ess-remote to check this isnt the
problem?

> 1. The behaviour of C-z isn't quite the same: when an ESS buffer is
>    associated with a 'normal' iESS buffer, the frame is split on issuing
>    C-z. But when associated with a remote buffer, C-z switches buffer
>    with no frame splitting.
Hmmm... what is C-z bound to in each case?

> 2. Entirely trivial but perhaps we could have 'R' as a synonym of 'r' at
>    step 5 above?

Yes - or perhaps replace r with R?

Stephen