[ESS] What is the right way to deal with modules with emacs/ESS/R on a cluster?

[Sparapani, Rodney]

Hi Gang:

I’m having some trouble between Emacs/ESS and R with modules
that I don’t understand.  We have two TORQUE clusters.  For best
results, I have to load emacs from a script like so from the command line…

#!/bin/bash

(module load R/4.0.1; emacs "$@")

On one cluster, the following elisp code works…
(defun R-4.0.1 () "Launch R v4.0.1"
       (interactive)
       (setq inferior-ess-r-program
                     (shell-command-to-string
                      "(module load R/4.0.1; echo -n `which R`)")) ;; subshell
       (R)
)

However, on the other cluster, I’m having trouble.  If I try to load
emacs from the script, then it is fighting with the window manager:
there is a window, but I can never bring into the foreground.  If I launch
emacs without the script, then it does play nice with the window
manager.  But, as you might have anticipated, there’s still a problem.
In the mini-buffer, I get
“apply: Searching for program: no such file or directory, R”.
However, the variable inferior-ess-r-program is now correctly defined as
/apps/shared/R/4.0.1/bin/R

Unfortunately, I have no control over the installation of software
on these clusters (except for via persistent begging).  So emacs-version is 23.1.1
and ess-version 15.09-2

--
Rodney Sparapani, Associate Professor of Biostatistics
Chair ISBA Section on Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical Statistics
Institute for Health and Equity, Division of Biostatistics
Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Campus


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