[ESS] ESS confused about newest R

[Enrico Schumann]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2022, Kevin R. Coombes via ESS-help writes:

> 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
>

I have only seen something like this on Windows, where
I explicitly set `inferior-ess-r-program` (which I
think was called `inferior-R-program-name` in older
versions of ESS) to the right executable.


-- 
Enrico Schumann
Lucerne, Switzerland
http://enricoschumann.net