[ESS] "?" not working with Julia?

[Stephen Eglen]

This issue with ESS/Julia should now be fixed in HEAD.  Thanks Ramon for
debugging and testing.

Stephen

On Sun, Jan 10 2016, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote:

> Problem solved, though I do not really understand why. I was seeing the
> problem in a machine where I had not installed any Julia packages; things
> got solved as soon as I installed a Julia package with Pkg.add (Gadfly
> here, but I guess anything else should do).
>
>
> I do not know if this is a Julia issue or an ESS issue or something else,
> but maybe the documentation at https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS/wiki/Julia
> could say something like "You might want to have installed at least one
> Julia package via Pkg.add to ensure that the help works".
>
>
>
> Details and reproducing the problem:
> ====================================
>
> This can be easily reproduced in a machine with installed Julia packages as
> follows:
>
>   a) Exit Julia and Emacs
>
>   b) Move your .julia somewhere (e.g., "mv .julia juliadot")
>
>   c) Start emacs, load ESS, start Julia
>
>   d) Try to get help for something. It fails.
>
>   e) Fix things back:
>   
>      e.1) Exit Julia and Emacs
>
>      e.2) Restore your .julia (e.g "rm -r -f .julia" and "mv juliadot
>      .julia")
>
>      e.3) Restart emacs, load ESS, start Julia. Getting help works again.
>
>
>
> In a machine without any packages I get:
>
> julia> whos()
>                           Base  24224 KB     Module
>                           Core   2850 KB     Module
>                            ESS    851 bytes  Module
>                           Main  26845 KB     Module
>                            ans      0 bytes  Void
>
> And
>
> julia> Pkg.status()
> INFO: Initializing package repository /home/ramon/.julia/v0.4
> INFO: Cloning METADATA from git://github.com/JuliaLang/METADATA.jl
> No packages installed
>
>
> The entry for ESS in particular seemed suspicious: whos() in a machine with
> installed packages shows about 14 KB for ESS and ESS/lisp/ess-julia.el
> makes Julia load the ESS module from ESS/etc/ess-julia.el (module ESS) when
> we M-x Julia.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
>
> R.
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, 10-01-2016, at 12:19, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte <rdiaz02 using gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Stephen,
>>
>>
>> On Sat, 09-01-2016, at 22:09, Stephen Eglen <sje30 using cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>> Thanks. If I may ask, if on Julia you type, say
>>>>
>>>> help("fft")
>>>>
>>>> do you get an error? That is what I get with the generic Linux Binary for
>>>> Julia 0.4.2 (downloaded right now from the julia page) and v. 0.4.2-3 from
>>>> Debian sid. However, I do not get an error if I use Julia 0.3.12.
>>>
>>> hi Ramon,
>>>
>>> I see the same within Julia started from the terminal; I think I had to
>>> update the ESS code a while ago to use the new (0.4) interface for help.
>>>
>>
>> But this is what I do not understand, because I have freshly installed ESS
>> from git and I am loading nothing but ESS. This is what I do:
>>
>>
>> - Remove all of the former ESS directory.
>>
>> - Do as instructed in https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS/wiki/Julia
>>   - git clone git://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS.git
>>   - git pull [not needed, but anyway]
>>   - make all
>>
>>
>> - Start Emacs as:  "emacs -Q"
>>
>> - Execute (load "path/to/ESS/git/lisp/ess-site")
>>   [I do not need to specify the path tp inferior-julia-program-name, as it
>>   is in /usr/bin, but specifying it makes no difference ]
>>
>> - M-x julia
>>   
>> - Try to get the help for something, and it fails with the "ERROR:
>>   UndefVarError: help not defined"
>>
>>
>>
>> The following is the complete content of the *Messages* buffer contents
>> after the above (plus asking for ess and emacs versions):
>>
>> ######################################
>>
>>
>> For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a.
>> Loading /home/ramon/Sources/ESS/lisp/ess-site...done
>> t
>> Type C-h m for help on ESS version 15.09-2 patched
>> ERROR: UndefVarError: help not defined
>> GNU Emacs 24.5.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.18.6) of 2015-12-14 on binet, modified by Debian
>> ess-version: 15.09-2 patched [git: 837454b76475a4eb3256e288fe4149a927faefa9] (loaded from /home/ramon/Sources/ESS/)
>>
>> #####################
>>
>>
>>
>> This process does work on another computer, so something is different and
>> broken in one machine, but for the life of me I just can't understand what
>> it is. I compared ---with diff--- the ESS directories in both machines and
>> the *.el files are identical; also identical are the versions of Emacs and
>> Julia. I removed all of the *.elc under ESS/lisp to force usage of the
>> source .el files, and it still fails.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>>
>> R.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> Stephen