[ESS] ESS 16.04 has been released

Martin Maechler m@ech|er @end|ng |rom @t@t@m@th@ethz@ch
Sat May 7 18:26:43 CEST 2016


After the prerelease announcement on Wed (May 4), 
and some small bug fixes all sent via github issues,
I have now released ESS 16.04.

This is quite a step forward from the 15.09 releases, notably as mentioned,
in the much improved "Package development" mode.
For more, see 'New Features' below.

One thing that has *not* happened yet is *.Rmd (Rmarkdown)
support, planned via "bundling" of Vitalie Spinu's  polymode.

If you find errors / problems you may open an issue on
github to report them ..  or use the good ole [ESS] menu
entry "send bug report" or equivalently M-x ess-submit-bug-report

Following the beginning of the auto-generated ANNOUNCE ment file

For the ESS core team,
Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich

--------------------------------------------------------------------

1 ANNOUNCING ESS
****************

The ESS Developers proudly announce the release of ESS 16.04

   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 Git for ESS development
-----------------------------

For development and experimentation on new ESS 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 Documentation (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 using stat.math.ethz.ch>;
contributions to the list may be mailed to <ess-help using 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 using 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 using gmail.com)
   * Richard M. Heiberger (mailto:rmh using temple.edu)
   * Kurt Hornik (mailto:Kurt.Hornik using R-project.org)
   * Martin Maechler (mailto:maechler using stat.math.ethz.ch)
   * Rodney A. Sparapani (mailto:rsparapa using mcw.edu)
   * Stephen Eglen (mailto:stephen using gnu.org)
   * Sebastian P. Luque (mailto:spluque using gmail.com)
   * Henning Redestig (mailto:henning.red using googlemail.com)
   * Vitalie Spinu (mailto:spinuvit using gmail.com)
   * Lionel Henry (mailto:lionel.hry using 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 and New Features in 16.04:

   * ESS[R]: 'developer' functionality has been refactored.  The new
     user interface consists of a single command
     'ess-r-set-evaluation-env' bound by default to 'C-c C-t C-s'.  Once
     an evaluation environment has been set with, all subsequent ESS
     evaluation will source the code into that environment.  By default,
     for file within R packages the evaluation environment is set to the
     package environment.  Set 'ess-r-package-auto-set-evaluation-env'
     to 'nil' to disable this.
   * ESS[R]: New 'ess-r-package-mode' This development mode provides
     features to make package development easier.  Currently, most of
     the commands are based on the 'devtools' packages and are
     accessible with 'C-c C-w' prefix.  See the documentation of
     'ess-r-package-mode' function for all available commands.  With
     'C-u' prefix each command asks for extra arguments to the
     underlying devtools function.  This mode is automatically enabled
     in all files within R packages and is indicated with '[pkg:NAME]'
     in the mode-line.
   * ESS[R]: Help lookup has been improved.  It is now possible to get
     help for namespaced objects such as pkg::foobar.  Furthermore, ESS
     recognizes more reliably when you change 'options('html_type')'.
   * ESS[R]: New specialized breakpoints for debugging magrittr pipes
   * ESS: ESS now implements a simple message passing interface to
     communicate between ESS and inferior process.

   Bug fixes in 16.04:
   * ESS[R]: Roxygen blocks with backtics are now correctly filled
   * ESS[R]: Don't skip breakpoints in magrittr's 'debug_pipe'
   * ESS[R]: Error highlighting now understands 'testthat' type errors
   * ESS[Julia]: Added getwd and setwd generic commands


Changes and New Features in 15.09:

   * ESS[R]: The indentation logic has been refactored.  It should be
     faster, more consistent and more flexible.  There are three types
     of indentation settings, those starting with 'ess-offset-' give the
     actual offsets, those starting with 'ess-indent-' are control
     (commonly Boolean) variables, and those starting with 'ess-align-'
     are vertical alignment overrides which inhibit default offsets in
     specific situations.  See 'ess-style-alist' for detailed
     description of the new indentation system and provided default
     indentation styles.

   * ESS[R]: Deprecation of old indentation settings.  As a consequence
     of the indentation re-factoring 'ess-brace-imaginary-offset',
     'ess-expression-offset' and all delimiter-specific offsets are
     deprecated.  The settings for indentation of continued statements
     have been replaced by 'ess-offset-continuations'.  It can be set to
     either 'cascade' or 'straight' (the default).
     'ess-arg-function-offset' has been replaced by
     'ess-indent-from-lhs' and has been generalised to assignments.
     This setting now works with both statement blocks and expressions
     and only takes effect for offsets set to 'prev-call' and
     'open-delim' in order to produce a consistent indentation.

   * ESS: A test framework has been set up.

   * ESS[R]: A new RStudio style is provided to mimic as closely as
     possible R files indented via RStudio.  To reproduce the setup of
     some of the RStudio users, the RStudio- style with
     'ess-offset-arguments' set to 'prev-line' is also provided.  In
     addition, the new RRR+ style is equivalent to RRR except it indents
     blocks in function calls relatively to the opening delimiter.  This
     style does not try to save horizontal space and produces more
     indentation.

   * ESS[R]: Roxygen fields will now be indented on paragraph refilling
     in order to make the documentation more readable.  You can also
     refill commented lines in the 'examples' field without squashing
     the surrounding code in the comments.

   * ESS[R]: ESS can now format your code!  This is controlled through
     the settings 'ess-fill-calls' and 'ess-fill-continuations'.  When
     activated, '(fill-paragraph)' formats your calls and your
     formulas/continuations while making sure they don't go past
     'fill-column'.  Repeated refills cycle through different styles
     (see the docstrings for more details).  By default, the refilled
     region blinks.  Set 'ess-blink-filling' to nil to prevent this.

   * ESS[R]: Fix occasional missing error location fontification in
     inferior buffers.

   * ESS[R]: ess-developer now correctly assigned the environment of new
     functions to the package namespace.

   * ESS[Julia]: ?[topic] now works in the *julia* buffer.  Note that
     support for editing Julia code now depends on 'julia-mode.el' from
     the Julia project.  If you install ESS from the official
     tarball/zip file, 'julia-mode.el' is already included.  Otherwise,
     if you install ESS by running 'make', then the latest version of
     'julia-mode.el' is downloaded (and so you need an active internet
     connection to install) during the installation process.
     Alternatively, if you run ESS without running 'make', then ensure
     that you have the 'julia-mode.el', which you can get easily from
     MELPA for example.

   * iESS: For naming inferior processes, ESS can use 'projectile''s
     project root and it does so when
     'ess-gen-proc-buffer-name-function' is set to
     'ess-gen-proc-buffer-name:projectile-or-simple' as by default, or
     to another value beginning with
     'ess-gen-proc-buffer-name:projectile-*'.


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