[ESS] A bad help request

Martin Maechler m@ech|er @end|ng |rom @t@t@m@th@ethz@ch
Sun May 17 18:03:27 CEST 2015


I  've got a new Laptop (with Fedora 21), also with Emacs 24.5.
I indeed have seen some slowish behavior inside ESS... I think in the
context of argument matching of functions  also  emacs dired is
extremely slow if used for a directory with 1000's of entries...   but
definitely did not see bad startup behavior of emacs ..


On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 5:33 PM, Vitalie Spinu <spinuvit using gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> ESS-help using r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-help
>>
>
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