[ESS] A bad help request

[Vitalie Spinu]

To the best of my knowledge ESS does not explicitly connect to internet.
There is no auto update feature of any kind. Would be great if you could
track the issue by stepping through ess-site.el and figuring out what piece
is causing the hang. Thanks, Vitalie

On 16 May 2015 at 17:04, Dr. Michael L. Dowling <Mike.Dowling using t-online.de>
wrote:

> Hello ESS mailing list!
>
> I'm afraid that  this will be a  very poor help request as  I simply was
> not methodical enough  to record exactly what I did  and where.  I would
> fully understand if nobody can respond.
>
> I have been using  emacs now for decades and ESS for  about 10 years.  I
> use Arch Linux.  Towards the end of April emacs-24.5 was released.  When
> I started emacs, it  behaved as though it just stopped  in the middle of
> loading,  and could  only  be stopped  with  a "kill  -9"  on the  emacs
> process.  I eventually realised that ESS was the culprit; comment it out
> of my .emacs file, and everything was  fine, except that I could not use
> ESS.
>
> Now, I work in Hamburg, where I  have no Internet, but return to my flat
> in Braunschweig  during the weekends.   I decided  to look into  this in
> Hamburg.  But  to my immense surprise,  it worked just fine  in Hamburg.
> But my Hamburg PC is an identical  copy on the Braunschweig PC; even the
> same hardware.  They are mutual backups of one another.
>
> Back in Braunschweig,  I turned off my router, and  bingo, emacs started
> normally.  Keep the router on but  turn off my firewall, emacs starts as
> it should.   Then I realised  that emacs was  not dead, but  instead was
> trying communicate via the Internet and was being stalled with time-outs
> resulting from the firewall.  Wait long enough, and emacs would start.
>
> This is  odd!  Everything  I would ever  want to do  on the  Internet is
> permitted.  Things  like initiating  a TCP  connection from  outside are
> not, with the exception of passive FTP which is permitted.
>
> I have since updated my  ESS package.  However, initially also suspected
> the icicles package, so I upgraded that as well.  Then everything worked
> as it should, here in Braunschweig  with the Internet and firewall.  But
> not in Hamburg.  These I had  to create a sub-directory of ess/etc/ESSR,
> I forget which.
>
> What I  suspect is that ESS  tries to check with  the repository perhaps
> with a view  to automatically updating (which would not  work as with me
> ESS is centrally installed by root).   But that would be permitted by my
> firewall!  Why does  ESS behave  differently with  and without  Internet
> connectivity?
>
> Personally, I  like to know when  software connects to the  Internet and
> would  like to  give  my  explicit consent  to  it  happening.  Is  this
> configurable in the ~/.emacs file?
>
> Sorry  if  this is  too  vague;  I was  not  very  professional with  my
> activities  to  document them  properly.   I  thought I  could  remember
> exactly what  I did in  Hamburg and what I  did in Braunschweig,  and so
> construct a  report.  In the  end, my memory  lapsed.  All the  same, if
> anybody has any suggestions, I would appreciate them.
>
> Cheers,
> Mike Dowling
>
> --
> Dr. Michael L. Dowling
> Gaußstr. 27
> 38106 Braunschweig
> Germany
>
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