[ESS] Latest Emacs distributions out!

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Vincent Goulet via ESS-help 
>>>>>     on Thu, 17 Sep 2020 16:34:54 -0400 writes:

    > Hi all, With some delay, I'm glad to announce that my
    > "modified" Emacs distributions for Windows and macOS based
    > off GNU Emacs 27.1 are out:

    > 	Windows:
    > https://vigou3.gitlab.io/emacs-modified-windows/ macOS:
    > https://vigou3.gitlab.io/emacs-modified-macOS/

    > For those of you unfamiliar with these distributions: they
    > are almost stock distributions of GNU Emacs with ESS,
    > AUCTeX, org and a few other goodies preinstalled. I use
    > the macOS version myself on a daily basis.

    > In the Windows version, I added a simple, temporary fix
    > for ESS 18.10.2 to find the versions of R 4.x.y on one's
    > system. The site-start.el includes this line:

    > (setq ess-r-versions '("R-1" "R-2" "R-3" "R-4" "R-devel"
    > "R-patched"))

    > Here 'M-x R' does not work as expected, by 'M-x R-[TAB]'
    > correctly lists all the versions of R on my system,
    > including 4.0.2.

    > Best,
    > v.

    > Vincent Goulet Professeur titulaire École d'actuariat,
    > Université Laval

Thank you very much, Vincent,  for this invaluable service to
those like me who work with Linux "all the time", but need to
run R on Windows a few times a month for testing purposes!

Above, you note

  --> Here 'M-x R' does not work as expected, ...

and I had noted this to happen already many months ago with your
previous versions of Emacs for Windows and current versions of R.

I never went to the root of the problem that evidently   M-x R
no longer works correctly on ESS for Windows.
My guess was that the 'R for Windows' version that we all use
built and packaged by Jeroen Ooms, must have changed some small
thing some months (but less than say 2 years) ago.

I think we should we'd be grateful if someone had the diligence
to find the root cause, and even better found a way for ESS to
again enable  M-x R  on Windows  (finding the latest released
version of R that's available on the machine where I also
typically have a dozen versions of R installed).

Best regards,
Martin

Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich  and  R Core team