Thanks for the suggestions. I do already version control some files under
~/.emacs.d (and many other ~/.* files as I'm trying to organise a dotfiles
repo for myself) such as init.el and a sub-dir 'settings' which holds
multiple files that are loaded from init.el. I opted to explicitly ignore
~/.emacs.d/elpa though as it felt like extra work to git add/commit each
time MELPA updated things. I'll look into straight.el and borg though to
see what they're like.
Thanks again for your help trouble-shooting this.
Neil
--
*Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high **degree
of improbability.* - R.A. Fisher
*Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge* - Charles
Darwin
PGP Public : https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get=0x0E7ECE9C10D7B4A0
Website - http://kimura.no-ip.info/
Photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/slackline/
On Wed, 3 Oct 2018 at 22:26, Alex Branham wrote:
> Version controlling your packages is definitely a good idea if you want
> to be able to switch between versions and rollback when things break.
> There's a few ways to do this:
>
> - relying on your distro's package manager to perform rollbacks when
> needed (guix and nix both do this well. I think nix is available for
> macos as well?).
>
> - use a package manager other than package.el. straight.el is one that
> provides a comparison between itself and a few others:
>
> https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el#comparison-to-other-package-managers
> .
> Personally I use borg.
>
> - Putting ~/.emacs.d/elpa under version control. This has a few
> downsides since packages change directories across updates, and it's
> easy to commit byte-compiled code.
>
> Alex
>
> On Wed 03 Oct 2018 at 15:21, Jeremie Juste via ESS-help <
> ess-help@r-project.org> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > Glad you could sort it out.
> > I think version controling the .emacs file and the .emacs.d directory
> > could help solve these issues faster. You could easily go back to a
> > previous working version. This might be helpful if you are in a
> > situation where you really need things to work.
> >
> > I'm currently exploring this idea but I don't know the full pros and
> > cons of this method.
> >
> >
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Jeremie
> >
> >
> >
> >> Timely
> >>
> >> On Wed, 3 Oct 2018 at 20:16, Alex Branham
> wrote:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> > I've tried disabling ess-smart-underscore as Alex suggests but no
> joy.
> >>>
> >>> I'm not familiar with how this package works but disabling it (by
> >>> removing the "require" from your init file) might not be enough.
> Emacs's
> >>> package manager autoloads some functionality if the package is simply
> >>> installed on your system. It doesn't do this if you do "emacs -Q",
> which
> >>> might explain why you don't see this error then.
> >>>
> >>> Timely as I've just been playing around and you are absolutely right,
> >> simply commenting out ess-smart-underscore from the settings wasn't
> >> sufficient. I decided to try manually delete it and ess from
> >> ~/.emacs.d/elpa/ess* completely and lo-and-behold I can now start R
> under
> >> Emacs/ESS with M-x R again.
> >>
> >> However, this is from the system-wide install of Emacs (currently
> ess-17.11
> >> under Gentoo).
> >>
> >> I did try installing just ess-20181003.1614 after seeing it had been
> >> updated today but that didn't work either.
> >>
> >> For me personally thats not a problem as I'm happy with not having the
> >> latest ESS, and I won't miss the functionality of ess-smart-underscore.
> >>
> >> As an aside it doesn't look like ess-smart-underscore is that old,
> current
> >> version on MELPA is from last month 20180911.523, some of the other ess
> >> packages are very old (ess-smart-equals was last updated 2015;
> >> ess-R-data-view 2013).
> >>
> >> If there is anything I can do to help fathom out what is going on let me
> >> know. I've included the debug from installing ess-20181003.1614 below
> for
> >> reference. This happens after installing from MELPA under the same
> Emacs
> >> instance, no restarting. If I delete ~/.emacs.d/elpa/ess-20181003.1614
> and
> >> restart Emacs M-x R works fine (as its using ess-17.11 from the main
> >> system).
> >>
> >> Thanks to yourself and Jeremie for your help and to all
> >> developers/maintainers.
> >>
> >> Neil
> >>
> >> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument consp nil)
> >> byte-code("\301\302 \"\303\241\210\301\304
> >> \"\305\241\210\306\307\300\"\207" [ess-r-customize-alist assoc
> >> ess-font-lock-keywords (quote ess-R-font-lock-keywords)
> >> inferior-ess-font-lock-keywords (quote
> inferior-ess-r-font-lock-keywords)
> >> defalias R-customize-alist] 3)
> >> autoload-do-load((autoload "ess-r-mode" "Call 'R', the 'GNU S' system
> >> from the R Foundation.\nOptional prefix (\\[universal-argument]) allows
> to
> >> set command line arguments, such as\n--vsize. This should be OS
> >> agnostic.\nIf you have certain command line arguments that should
