[ESS] Clues for the User on the Specific Emacs/ESS setup

[Stephen Eglen]

Thanks for these points John.

> In the README (http://ess.r-project.org/Manual/readme.html), it says,
> under "1.6 Unix installation":
> <<<
> 2. Then, add the line
>           (require 'ess-site)
> to ~/.emacs and restart Emacs.
> 3. If you see a buffer named *ESS*, then the simple instructions were
> most likely successful. If not, then read further.

We probably can mention that 1.6 is not even relevant if the user has
got a pre-installed version of ESS.

> There might be a separate brief section on MacOS X installation, but I
> judge that this issue is wider than MacOS X.

Yes, e.g. it might affect debian installs (thanks Ramon).  I need to
check.


> Vincent, it would I think be helpful to include on your web page
> http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/emacs/ a note warning that (at least
> for the OS X version), customisations that must be loaded prior to
> loading ess-site should go into site-start.el (or default.el, if that
> is how you decide to do it), prior to the line that loads ess-site,
> not into .emacs.

Certainly now that we have raised this issue, we should try to think of
a way to cleanly fix it so that user's don't need such warnings.  e.g. I
think the default.el approach should work.

> Actually (returning to the customisation issue with which this started), why not include
>   (setq ess-r-versions '("R-2" "R32" "R64"))
> in the site-start.el file (or in default.el, if that is what you
>   decide to go with)?

This is probably something we can do anyway for all users of ESS on mac,
not just those using Vincent's install.  Should be straightforward.


> Would it make sense to flag, when ess-site is loaded, the file that has the command 
> that loads it?
I'd be reluctant to do that -- we should teach the user's instead to use
M-x locate-library RET as that is the general Emacs approach.

Stephen