Re: reftex needs to be upgraded.

Hans de Graaff writes: True. That kind of dependency is completely unsupported by the XEmacs package system. If you want to support them, you'll have to do it yourself for the foreseeable future, because we don't know how to do it even if we wanted to. See below. The only package where this matters a lot is APEL. In most other cases the compatibility code is a monkey-patch ported from 21.5 (or more likely from GNU Emacs, and also sync'ed into 21.5). You may have some extra code, but it ends up doing the same thing. What special treatment do you have in mind? In practice, for separate Lisp libraries (including collections like Gnus or Calc) there is *one* compile option: to compile or not. We do have an infrastructure in the CVS tree which ensures that all code in the build environment comes from either the core of the compiling XEmacs or the CVS tree. That is the most important purpose served by the package infrastructure.[1] But that basically requires having the whole source tree in place. As a package distributor, you should consider the CVS tree a monolithic source, as we do. Then break out the separate packages that you want to distribute, as we do. As a user, you just byte-compile the files that you have. Then give the users a snapshot of the CVS source tree. That's effectively what GNU Emacs does, but it's still somewhat smaller than ours. Yeah, well, you can't have both. By the nature of things Lispish such interim fixes can have a significant effect on the user's environment, and you no longer can be confident of what "version" that environment is when you compile new packages in it. Not to mention that Emacs Lisp is worse than GNOME for having interlocking dependencies. And really, you need to track dependencies at the defun level, not at the library, let along the package level as the distros do. On the one hand, if you have a bug in a function and you fix it, all you have to do is monkey-patch the running Emacs by executing the fixed defun or a defadvice. (This is effectively what APEL is, an extensive collection of monkey patches.) On the other, if you fix a bug in a macro or defsubst, then you must recompile every function that invokes that code---recursively (macros often invoke other macros). I'm not saying what you want to do is stupid; just that the design of Emacs Lisp makes it a lot more complicated than it is for sensible programming systems (eg, Brainf*ck or Intercal). Footnotes: [1] Much of the code, on the other hand, is devoted to just moving the enormous variety of source layouts into our uniform installed layout. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta