[ESS] ?foo doesn't work in development [sometimes]

[Ross Boylan]

Fantastic: now help seems to work OK even if I start by asking for ?']'
and the entire list of commands I asked for help on before.

Or is ?'[' supposed to bring up something useful?  It's still not, but
now I can see help on other things fine.

I wish I knew why I keep getting these unreproducible failures....

Ross

P.S. emacs 23.4.1, R 2.15.1.
On Thu, 2013-10-03 at 13:14 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
> I synced up with ESS git yesterday, and noticed today that ? help
> doesn't work.  That is, if I type ?matrix nothing happens except I get a
> new line with a prompt.
> 
> I have edited ess-help.el locally to eliminate the 'force argument that
> caused trouble for my emacs.  But I didn't notice any changes to that
> file when I took in the latest changes.
> 
> *ESS* shows
> ----------------------------------------------
> ess-setq-vars-LOCAL): language=S, dialect=R, buf=nil, comint..echoes=t,
> comint..sender=comint-simple-send
> (ess-help '*help[R](matrix)*' start  ..
>  |--> t [searching nil]
> (ess-help: kill bogus buffer *help[R](matrix)* ..
> --------------------------------------------
> 
> *Messages* has
> -----------------------------------------
> No documentation for ‘']'’ in specified packages and libraries:
> No documentation for ‘'['’ in specified packages and libraries:
> No documentation for ‘subscript’ in specified packages and libraries:
> No documentation found;  [2 times]
> ---------------------------------------------
> reflecting some earlier queries (which also produced nothing).  There
> are corresponding entries in *ESS* for them.
> 
> I was also a bit suprised by the new startup, since AFIK ESS didn't use
> to install a library:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22) -- "Roasted Marshmallows"
> Copyright (C) 2012 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
> ISBN 3-900051-07-0
> Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
> 
> R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
> You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
> Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.
> 
>   Natural language support but running in an English locale
> 
> R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
> Type 'contributors()' for more information and
> 'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.
> 
> Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
> 'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
> Type 'q()' to quit R.
> 
> > >
> install.packages('/home/ross/UCSF/Choi/GitHub/ESS/etc/ESSR_1.0.tar.gz')
> Installing package(s) into
> ‘/home/ross/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.15’
> (as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
> inferring 'repos = NULL' from the file name
> * installing *source* package ‘ESSR’ ...
> ** R
> ** preparing package for lazy loading
> ** help
> *** installing help indices
> ** building package indices
> ** testing if installed package can be loaded
> 
> * DONE (ESSR)
> > library(ESSR)
> > options(STERM='iESS', str.dendrogram.last="'", editor='emacsclient',
> show.error.locations=TRUE)
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>