Gregory,
That is a problem, and it is somewhat know. ESS used to release every six or so months, now we are many years behind with no official release. Your best bet may be to install directly from melpa and removing the package. I will bring this to the ESS list but last time this was brought up everybody more or less agreed but no release tarball was made because "it's complicated". Best, Dirk -- dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org