[ESS] ESS 13.09 released
Martin Maechler
maechler at lynne.ethz.ch
Fri Sep 27 19:11:44 CEST 2013
Dear ESS users and lovers,
A few moments ago, we have relased ESS 13.09.
You can get it almost directly from
http://ess.r-project.org/index.php?Section=download
It contains new features and somewhat important improvements of
existing functionality, notably in
- working with julia
- ess-developer interface
- remote evaluation
For more details follows the first part of the ANNOUNCE file
part of the ESS docu, notably containing
'1.9 New Features', (here the 13.09 ones only)
In the name of the ESS Core Team,
--
Martin Maechler,
ETH Zurich
--------------------------------------------------------
1 ANNOUNCING ESS
****************
The ESS Developers proudly announce the release of ESS 13.09
Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) provides an intelligent, consistent
interface between the user and the software. ESS interfaces with
R/S-PLUS, SAS, BUGS/JAGS, Stata and other statistical analysis packages
under the UNIX, GNU Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and other
operating systems. ESS is a package for the GNU Emacs and XEmacs text
editors whose features ESS uses to streamline the creation and use of
statistical software. ESS knows the syntax and grammar of statistical
analysis packages and provides consistent display and editing features
based on that knowledge. ESS assists in interactive and batch execution
of statements written in these statistical analysis languages.
ESS is freely available under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Please read the file COPYING which comes with the distribution, for more
information about the license. For more detailed information, please
read the README files that come with ESS.
1.1 Getting the Latest Version
==============================
The latest released version of ESS is always available on the web at:
ESS web page (http://ess.r-project.org) or StatLib
(http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/general/ESS/)
1.1.1 ESS subversion repository
-------------------------------
The latest development version of ESS is available via
<https://svn.R-project.org/ESS/>, the ESS Subversion repository. If you
have a Subversion client (see <http://subversion.tigris.org/>), you can
download the sources using:
% svn checkout https://svn.r-project.org/ESS/trunk PATH
which will put the ESS files into directory PATH. Later, within that
directory, 'svn update' will bring that directory up to date.
Windows-based tools such as TortoiseSVN are also available for
downloading the files. Alternatively, you can browse the sources with a
web browser at: ESS SVN site (https://svn.r-project.org/ESS/trunk).
However, please use a subversion client instead to minimize the load
when retrieving.
If you remove other versions of ESS from your emacs load-path, you
can then use the development version by adding the following to .emacs:
(load "/path/to/ess-svn/lisp/ess-site.el")
Note that https is required, and that the SSL certificate for the
Subversion server of the R project is
Certificate information:
- Hostname: svn.r-project.org
- Valid: from Jul 16 08:10:01 2004 GMT until Jul 14 08:10:01 2014 GMT
- Issuer: Department of Mathematics, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, CH
- Fingerprint: c9:5d:eb:f9:f2:56:d1:04:ba:44:61:f8:64:6b:d9:33:3f:93:6e:ad
(currently, there is no "trusted certificate"). You can accept this
certificate permanently and will not be asked about it anymore.
1.1.2 Git for development
-------------------------
For development and experimentation on new features, there is now a
GitHub branch for ESS, available at <https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS>.
1.2 Current Features
====================
* Languages Supported:
* S family (R and S+ AKA S-PLUS)
* SAS
* OpenBUGS/JAGS
* Stata
* Julia
* Editing source code (S family, SAS, OpenBUGS/JAGS, Stata, Julia)
* Syntactic indentation and highlighting of source code
* Partial evaluation of code
* Loading and error-checking of code
* Source code revision maintenance
* Batch execution (SAS, OpenBUGS/JAGS)
* Use of imenu to provide links to appropriate functions
* Interacting with the process (S family, SAS, Stata, Julia)
* Command-line editing
* Searchable Command history
* Command-line completion of S family object names and file
names
* Quick access to object lists and search lists
* Transcript recording
* Interface to the help system
* Transcript manipulation (S family, Stata)
* Recording and saving transcript files
* Manipulating and editing saved transcripts
* Re-evaluating commands from transcript files
* Interaction with Help Pages and other Documenation (R)
* Fast Navigation
* Sending Examples to running ESS process.
* Fast Transfer to Further Help Pages
* Help File Editing (R)
* Syntactic indentation and highlighting of source code.
* Sending Examples to running ESS process.
* Previewing
1.3 Requirements
================
ESS is most likely to work with current/recent versions of the following
statistical packages: R/S-PLUS, SAS, Stata, OpenBUGS and JAGS.
ESS supports current, and recent, stable versions of GNU Emacs
(currently, specifically, the 23.x and 24.x series;
alpha/beta/pre-release versions are NOT SUPPORTED). Non-Windows users
beware: GNU Emacs 24.3 is preferable to 24.1 or 24.2: these broken
builds suffer from bug 12463
<http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=12463> which will cause
emacs and ESS to get progressively slower over time.
Due to XEmacs lacking some features that ESS requires, ESS support of
XEmacs ends with ESS 12.04-4. This decision will be re-visited in the
future as XEmacs continues to sync with GNU Emacs.
To build the PDF documentation, you will need a version of TeX Live
or texinfo that includes texi2dvi (BEWARE: recent TeX Live, and some
texinfo RPMs, do NOT include texi2dvi).
1.4 Stability
=============
All recent released versions are meant to be release-quality versions.
While some new features are being introduced, we are cleaning up and
improving the interface. We know that there are many remaining
opportunities for documentation improvements, but all contributors are
volunteers and time is precious. Patches or suggested fixes with bug
reports are much appreciated!
1.5 Mailing List
================
There is a mailing list for discussions and announcements relating to
ESS. Join the list by sending an e-mail with "subscribe ess-help" (or
"help") in the body to <ess-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch>;
contributions to the list may be mailed to <ess-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>.
Rest assured, this is a fairly low-volume mailing list.
The purposes of the mailing list include
* helping users of ESS to get along with it.
* discussing aspects of using ESS on Emacs and XEmacs.
* suggestions for improvements.
* announcements of new releases of ESS.
* posting small patches to ESS.
1.6 Reporting Bugs
==================
Please send bug reports, suggestions etc. to
<ESS-bugs at stat.math.ethz.ch>
The easiest way to do this is within Emacs by typing
'M-x ess-submit-bug-report'
This also gives the maintainers valuable information about your
installation which may help us to identify or even fix the bug.
If Emacs reports an error, backtraces can help us debug the problem.
Type "M-x set-variable RET debug-on-error RET t RET". Then run the
command that causes the error and you should see a *Backtrace* buffer
containing debug information; send us that buffer.
Note that comments, suggestions, words of praise and large cash
donations are also more than welcome.
1.7 Authors
===========
* A.J. Rossini (mailto:blindglobe at gmail.com)
* Richard M. Heiberger (mailto:rmh at temple.edu)
* Kurt Hornik (mailto:Kurt.Hornik at R-project.org)
* Martin Maechler (mailto:maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch)
* Rodney A. Sparapani (mailto:rsparapa at mcw.edu)
* Stephen Eglen (mailto:stephen at gnu.org)
* Sebastian P. Luque (mailto:spluque at gmail.com)
* Henning Redestig (mailto:henning.red at googlemail.com)
* Vitalie Spinu (mailto:spinuvit at gmail.com)
1.8 License
===========
The source and documentation of ESS is free software. You can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General
Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
ESS is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License in
the file COPYING in the same directory as this file for more details.
1.9 New Features
================
Changes/New Features in 13.09:
* font-lock in process buffers doesn't "spill" over prompts. Missing
closing string delimiters should not cause wrong fontification of
the following command input.
* ESS[julia]: full features M-TAB completion and auto-complete
support, which now works for modules, structures and data types.
* ESS[julia]: a much better eldoc showing arguments of methods and
data type constructors
* ESS-developer:
- ESS-developer work-flow pattern has been streamlined:
ESS-developer is now automatically activated on per-file basis
if the file is part of a developed package
'ess-developer-packages'. The old behavior (activation on
per-process basis) is still available on 'M-x ess-developer'
in a process buffer.
- integration with 'devtools' package. New command
'ess-developer-load-package' calls 'load_all' on the package
containing current file. 'ess-developer-add-package' now
offers IDO menu completions with available loading methods,
currently 'library', and 'load_all'. Loading command can be
customized with 'ess-developer-load-on-add-commands'.
* 'TAB' now indents region if region is active (a contribution of
Matthew Fidler in pull #41)
* 'M-x ess-version' now reports full loading path and recognizes git
and ELPA versions.
* warning and error keyword are now highlighted with
'font-lock-warning-face' as they should be, (for quite some time
these keywords have been hijacked by compilation mode
fontification).
* eldoc: Eldoc now recognizes multiple processes. If current process
is busy, or current buffer is not associated with a process, eldoc
picks its completions from the first available free process.
* org-babel: evaluation is now org-friendly
* help: new help buffers now try to reuse ess-help buffers. This
behavior is controlled by 'ess-help-reuse-window' custom variable.
* help: ?foo pops IDO menu on multiple help files (so far it worked
only for 'C-c C-v')
* remote evaluation is considerably faster now on slow connections
* ESS[R] tracebug R source references regular expressions are
(mostly) language agnostic.
* 'ess-function-call-face' inherits from
'font-lock-function-name-face' rather than
'font-lock-builtin-face'.
* 'ess-inject-source' now accepts 'function-and-buffer' option.
* Documentation: The "New Features" section (and 'NEWS') now
represent recent changes: within the last year or so. All changes
can be found in the new news.html (news.html) (or 'NEWS' and
'ONEWS').
* ESS[R] 'ess-rep-regexp' should no longer inf.loop (rarely!), and
hence 'M-x ess-fix-miscellaneous' should neither.
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