[ESS] Advice on setting up ESS to edit and knit Rmarkdown files

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Lionel Henry via ESS-help 
>>>>>     on Wed, 22 Sep 2021 15:15:42 +0200 writes:

    > We'd love to do a release but ESS is not in a good place
    > right now.  

Definitely.  The reason is that there have been too many bugs
introduced with the new features, so we could/should not
release.

This has been the real reason for not releasing formally.

In addition, another important goal for the release has been to
create an ESS+ "package" (not mainly an ELPA package, but also a
traditional  tarball / zip file) which will contain
ESS plus relevant parts of polymode even though the latter is
only maintained by one of us; the use of both *and* correct
interplay between polymode and ESS is really crucial for parts
modern R using ESS, notably as we had decided to declare the ess
noweb-mode (for editing *.Rnw, i.e., Sweave & (tex-based) knitr)
as obsolete. 

    > Recent versions of Emacs interrupt background
    > commands (essential to completion and contextual help like
    > eldoc) when the user starts typing, which causes hard to
    > solve problems.

    > The dev branch is mostly working but not 100%
    > correctly. Unfortunately none of us seem to have the time
    > to work on ESS at the moment.

    > That said, while Martin, Vitalie and I notice issues here
    > and there, we haven't had serious bug reports in a while,
    > despite the dev branch being used by many Melpa users. So
    > maybe releasing in the current state is better than  nothing.

Well...
It would be the first ESS release with serious (for some / in
some use case situaitons) known bugs ..

    > Best, Lionel


    > On 9/22/21, Dirk Eddelbuettel via ESS-help
    > <ess-help using r-project.org> wrote:
    >> 
    >> On 20 September 2021 at 13:59, Sparapani, Rodney via
    >> ESS-help wrote: | Generally, this stuff should just work
    >> out-of-the-box.
    >> 
    >> Understood.
    >> 
    >> | And we are not a company like RStudio so this FOSS
    >> setup works for us as | developers and hopefully it still
    >> serves the users well.
    >> 
    >> But legal structure has nothing to with 'calling a
    >> release'. Which is done by authors (who should know the
    >> code better than users) saying "yep what we have at HEAD
    >> right now is good" and then cut a tarball.  That is a
    >> _marker_.  Which some less-informed people like me can
    >> take (and then ship downstream to Debian, and with that
    >> Ubuntu etc).
    >> 
    >> Without a marker, no shipment. Less ideal to me and
    >> others.
    >> 
    >> So pretty-please if someone would: could a release one of
    >> these moons. It does not have to be frequent or regularly
    >> schedule or anything.  But maybe more often than once
    >> every few years?  Maybe when you sync with upstream Emacs
    >> (assuming you do now)?
    >> 
    >> Dirk
    >> 
    >> --
    >> https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel |
    >> edd using debian.org
    >> 
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