compiling the beta on an iMac

Others have already answered a lot of the mechanical questions, but I'll add glosses with rationale and explanation. Lynn David Newton writes: I guess this is due to distributing .elcs built with mule in the tarball. I'm not sure what I want to do about that. That error form is not present in the .el, so it was automatically added by the byte-compiler. I think this is excessively paranoid, as in core Lisp the relevant code is protected by runtime feature tests. But we'll see. To build with Mule, add '--with-mule' to the configure command, then a bare 'make' will get you going. To build without Mule, do 'make beta' (which deletes the .elcs) instead of a bare 'make'. The next beta will probably have the default reversed. I personally think that it should be possible to disable features you don't need, so the --with-mule option won't be removed any time soon. On the other hand, the no-mule configuration can't properly handle certain characters (including directed quotes, ellipses, math, smilies, and so on) that are unavailable in Latin 1 but are becoming common even in many purely US English applications. This changed between XEmacs 21.4 and recent XEmacs 21.5. In 21.5, it defaults to $prefix/share/xemacs/{xemacs,mule,site}-packages. In 21.4, it's $prefix/lib/xemacs/{xemacs,mule,site}-packages. By default prefix=/usr/local, so for 21.5 you would want to untar the sumos in /usr/local/share/xemacs/xemacs-packages /usr/local/share/xemacs/mule-packages respectively. If you have an existing installation of packages, you can use a configure option. For example, if you have a Debian installation of XEmacs 21.4, you will have packages in /usr/share/xemacs21, and you can configure that with configure --with-system-packages=/usr/share/xemacs21 XEmacs 21.5 is fully compatible with packages built for 21.4 in my experience. There's one known gotcha introduced by improved support for multiple values in very recent 21.5 which must be addressed by upgrading affected packages. Unfortunately I don't have a list offhand. That's the most recent sumo. hyperbole is a package, and therefore is 100% optional in any vanilla XEmacs since 20.5. Any hyperbole-related issues you have must be triggered by settings in your custom and init files. If you install packages separately for 21.5, then you can remove hyperbole. This may initially cause some pain if code in init.el requires hyperbole and so errors during the init process, but once you get a clean start, any hyperbole-related issues will be gone. (BTW, do NOT edit .xemacs/custom.el by hand without taking very careful precautions. That code is quite specialized and very fragile. Backing up each working version is sufficient, of course. You should keep the backups for a while, since many customizations affect behavior that is only rarely used by most users.) I suspect that you may find that some of the behavior you thought was introduced by hyperbole is still present because it's actually part of XEmacs, or some other package that you do want to use. That would be a shame and not so easily "fixed", but you are certainly welcome to request bugfixes and RFEs to improve your "XEmacs experience". Steve _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta