[ESS] Problem with Rd-preview-help

[Martin Maechler]

Dear David,
13.05 is already bit dated in "ESS time" which has been running pretty
fast recently.
Any chance, you could upgrade to the latest version from Vincent
Goulet, which is  13.09-1
(from ~ one month ago)?
It may not necessarily solve the problem, but we would be an order of
magnitude more motivated to solve it,  if we knew the problem was
still there in current emacs/ESS..

Happy New Year ... and best regards,
Martin
Martin <Maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>  http://stat.ethz.ch/people/maechler
Seminar für Statistik, ETH Zürich  HG G 16      Rämistrasse 101
CH-8092 Zurich, SWITZERLAND
phone: +41-44-632-3408       fax: ...-1228      <><


On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 1:15 AM, David Scott <d.scott at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> I am using ESS 13.05 with Emacs 24.3.1 on Windows, Vince Goulet's
> distribution.
>
> I am trying to preview a .Rd file, using C-c C-p or M-x Rd-preview-help. I
> get an error:
>
> Warning in file(con, "r") :
>   cannot open file
> ''c:/Users/dsco036/Documents/Research/Packages/xtableDevel/xtable/pkg/man/string.Rd'':
> Invalid argument
> Error in file(con, "r") : cannot open the connection
> Execution halted
>
> This used to work some time ago, but hasn't been working now for a while. I
> have just ignored it but was encouraged to think I might be able to sort it
> out by using the function debugging Vitalie helped me with recently. (Use
> C-u C-M-x on the function and step through with 'n'). However when I go to
> Rd-preview-help in ess-rd.el, issue C-u C-M-x, then invoke Rd-preview-help,
> the debugger fails to operate, and I just see the error above. I also tried
> to run a back trace as in Section 16.2 of the manual but no *Backtrace*
> buffer appeared.
>
> I suspect this to be another Windows command line 'feature', because of the
> presence of lines
>
> (setq shcmd (format "%s '%s'" Rd-to-help-command file))
>
> and later
>
> (ess-write-to-dribble-buffer
>      (format "Rd-preview-help: (shell-command |%s| t)" shcmd))
> (shell-command shcmd t)
>
> C-h v Rd-to-help-command gives
> Rd-to-help-command is a variable defined in `ess-rd.el'.
> Its value is "R CMD Rd2txt"
>
> I can process the .Rd file from emacs with
>
> M-! R CMD Rd2txt filename.Rd
>
> and get what seems to be the same result as I obtain on linux, so it doesn't
> seem to be a path problem.
>
> David Scott
>
>
> --
> _________________________________________________________________
> David Scott     Department of Statistics
>                 The University of Auckland, PB 92019
>                 Auckland 1142,    NEW ZEALAND
> Phone: +64 9 923 5055, or +64 9 373 7599 ext 85055
> Email:  d.scott at auckland.ac.nz,  Fax: +64 9 373 7018
>
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