[ESS] Issues with ESS, running R on a remote server via tramp

[Vitalie Spinu]

Hi Chris, 

v13.05 is know to have some issues with remotes. There have been quite
some work recently on improving remotes, especially with TRAMP so even
13.09 might not be satisfactory now. 

Please try the dev version. The help issue is due to wrong settings of
the PAGER environment variable, which sould be "cat". You can set it
either in R options or in the sh/bash config files. 

In ESS dev, this is done automatically now, both for TRAM and
ess-remote.

   Vitalie


 >>> Chris Wallace on Thu, 28 Nov 2013 13:06:05 +0000 wrote:

 > Dear ESS-help,

 > I am a very recent convert to ESS, but a long term user of emacs and R.  In a
 > linux environment, I am newly running R within emacs, via M-x R, and using tramp
 > to run R on a remote hose through ssh, so at the prompt for a starting
 > directory, I do "/ssh:remote:~/mydir". Everything works well except for two
 > problems.

 > First, when I try to access help, via "?xxx" or via C-c C-v, the R window hangs,
 > and I have to C-g, C-c C-c.  Then, sometimes the help is shown, sometimes not.

 > Second, when I use C-c C-c from the ESS buffer, to send a command to the iESS
 > buffer, it can sometimes fail with:

 > Error in file(filename, "r", encoding = encoding) :
 >   cannot open the connection
 > In addition: Warning message:
 > In file(filename, "r", encoding = encoding) :
 >   cannot open file '/tmp/ESS-region/ebi-part1.R at 9': No such file or directory

 > even though the text appears pasted in the iESS buffer. C-<return> to step
 > through line by line never fails.

 > Neither problem occurs when I run R locally, and so I suspect both of these
 > problems may relate to running R on a remote host. However, I do need to be able
 > to run R on a remote host (which does not have emacs installed) to be able to
 > access various other servers on which data are stored.

 > In case it's relevant, emacs-version is 24.2.1, ess-version is 13.05, R is
 > 3.0.2.  The ESS section in my .emacs is:

 > (require 'tramp)
 > (require 'ess-site)
 > (require 'ess-bugs-d)
 >   (setq comint-scroll-to-bottom-on-input t)
 >   (setq comint-scroll-to-bottom-on-output t)
 >   (setq comint-move-point-for-output t)
 > (setq ess-eval-visibly 'nowait)  ;; need this to avoid emacs hanging on large
 > evaluations
 > (setq ess-help-own-frame 'one) ;;;;; all help buffers to go into one frame

 > In my .Rprofile I have

 > options(help_type="text")

 > Thank you for any advice,

 > Chris

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