User manual

Chapter 2: Installing ESS on your system 20
ESS is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PAR-
TICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License in the file COPYING in the
same directory as this file for more details.
2.3 Stability
All recent released versions are meant to be release-quality versions. While some new fea-
tures are being introduced, we are cleaning up and improving the interface. We know that
there are many remaining opportunities for documentation improvements, but all contrib-
utors are volunteers and time is precious. Patches or suggested fixes with bug reports are
much appreciated!
2.4 Requirements
ESS is most likely to work with current/recent versions of the following statistical packages:
R/S-PLUS, SAS, Stata, OpenBUGS and JAGS.
ESS supports current, and recent, stable versions of GNU Emacs (currently, specifically,
the 23.x and 24.x series; alpha/beta/pre-release versions are NOT SUPPORTED). Non-
Windows users beware: GNU Emacs 24.3 is preferable to 24.1 or 24.2: these broken builds
suffer from bug 12463 http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=12463 which
will cause emacs and ESS to get progressively slower over time.
Due to XEmacs lacking some features that ESS requires, ESS support of XEmacs ends
with ESS 12.04-4. This decision will be re-visited in the future as XEmacs continues to
sync with GNU Emacs.
To build the PDF documentation, you will need a version of TeX Live or texinfo that
includes texi2dvi (BEWARE: recent TeX Live, and some texinfo RPMs, do NOT include
texi2dvi).