[ESS] How to run latest ESS to get Polymode etc. on Debian stable

[Vitalie Spinu]

Indeed, I concur. The best way to go is to install emacs from source. It
is really straightforward. Plenty of resources out there. For example:
http://alexhenning.github.io/blog/2010/11/05/emacs24-on-ubuntu/

Polymode is unstable, once it matures enough it will be part of some
emacs package archive and you will be able to install/update it with two
clicks if you want. For now, just follow the git instructions. It
doesn't work for emacs < 24.3 as yet.

    Vitalie

  >> Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu>
  >> on Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:08:40 -0500 wrote:

 > On 04/10/2013 02:25 AM, Chris Evans wrote:
 >> Dear all,
 >> 
 >> I am not a programmer though I've ran my own Debian servers for internet work
 >> for probably a decade without major problems (given that up now as I think you
 >> need to be more up to date with security issues than I can manage to be) and I
 >> have done my own work including R via ESS on a Debian laptop for a year or so
 >> now and now try to run Windoze only in a VM and as rarely as possible.
 >> 
 >> I find myself using ESS/R for most things as I love the combination but I use
 >> Rstudio for some projects things as that gets me knitr to produce pretty good
 >> literate stats outputting through to nice(ish) HTML and I don't find I can do
 >> that as painlessly using ESS.  However, I think I see Polymode taking ESS
 >> closer to Rstudio's ease and integration with knitr so I'd like to follow the
 >> bleeding edge but I think that requires that run a more up to date Emacs than
 >> the 23.2.1 that comes with Debian stable.  I couldn't seem to get the
 >> emacs-snapshot to work on my system and pulling ESS from SVN seemed to work
 >> fine for a while but ended up with my having an emacs/ESS combination that
 >> wouldn't work (I can give diagnostics and go back there probably but I'd
 >> rather make a clean start).
 >> 
 >> Can anyone give the list (or just me) advice?  Ideally I'd like to be able to install and invoke two parallel emacs/ESS combinations:
 >> 1) the vanilla Debian stable ones (fallback)
 >> 2) whatever I would best use to follow the Polymode evolution, perhaps pulling latest stable Emacs directly and the SVN builds of ESS and Polymode on say a daily basis.
 >> 
 >> I have superuser access to the machine so that's not an issue.  Anyone able to
 >> give me instructions in how to achieve this (don't assume I'll know to run
 >> make or something, I'm happy to do things like that and to get them running
 >> from anacron triggered bash scripts, I am just pretty ignorant about the whole
 >> emacs/elisp/ESS guts so need to be alerted to what needs making, what needs
 >> byte-compiling and how and the like.
 >> 
 >> I'm happy to blog the experience somewhere so there's a record others can follow.
 >> 
 >> TIA,
 >> 
 >> Chris

 > Hi Chris:

 > Eventually, you will be able to do this with Debian unstable.  So, you have two
 > options that I see:  wait for unstable to catch up or build emacs 24.3 from
 > source creating a parallel setup in /usr/local. However, this assumes a coherent
 > environment variable setup for your
 > tool chain, i.e. something like...
 > CC="gcc"
 > CFLAGS="-g"
 > CXX="g++"
 > CXXFLAGS="-g"
 > CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include"
 > LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib64 -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/usr/local/lib64"
 > PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib64/pkgconfig"

 > # as yourself
 > create /usr/local/src/emacs
 > download emacs-24.3.tar.gz there
 > tar zxf emacs-24.3.tar.gz
 > cd emacs-24.3
 > configure
 > make
 > make install # as su

 > Now, follow the ESS (and polymode) installation instructions.  But, be patient;
 > lots of things can go wrong.  However, I think we may be drifting pretty far
 > afield from ESS.  We are taking for granted that
 > the users have emacs properly installed and configured in order to
 > install/use ESS.