[ESS] how to override site install of ESS?

[Sebastian P.Luque]

On Tue, 9 Apr 2013 10:18:38 -0700,
Ross Boylan <ross at biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:

> 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.

Also in Debian, I think I worked around this in the past (long ago
though, when I had the ess package installed but wanted to load a local
development version):

(setq load-path
      (delete "/usr/share/emacs23/site-lisp/ess/" load-path)
      ess-etc-directory "~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/ess/etc"
      ess-lisp-directory "~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/ess/lisp")
(require 'ess-site "~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/ess/lisp/ess-site")

IOW, remove the site-wide ess paths from `load-path' and set the
critical ess variables before loading the local ess-site.el.  Not sure
if it would still work (haven't tested it in a long time).

-- 
Seb