[ESS] ESS confused about newest R

[Kevin R. Coombes]

Hi,

I have been using emacs with ESS for years. By now,I  probably have old 
versions of each installed - so I know one answer to my question is 
probably "install the newest versions". But I don't really want to do 
that right now. (Especially since the web support page for ESS still 
claims that my ancient version is the most recent official release.)

Ever since I installed R 4.2.0 (and now having just installed R-4.2.1), 
ESS insists that R-4.1.0 is the newest version on my system. It creates 
separate commands to run R-4.2.0-64bit and R-4.2.1-64bit, but is unable 
to tell that these are newer than R-4.1.0, so the default "M-x R" is the 
same as "M-x R-newest", which starts the wrong version

The only thing that I see that has changed is that all earlier versions 
of R also include 32-bit versions. I don't see why that should matter, 
since I have *not* changed the default value (t) of 
ess-prefer-higher-bit. Obviously, I am missing something, since I can't 
figure out how to convince ESS to take the R-4.2 versions into 
consideration when determining the newest version.

Has anyone eslse seen this? Does anyone know if there are minor edits I 
can make to ess-r-mode-el that will persuade my old versions of emacs 
and ESS to just do the right thing?

Thanks,
   Kevin