Didier Verna <verna(a)inf.enst.fr&gt; writes: It's called `xemacs-20.0' on Altair due to lack of foresightedness on my part when I first set it up two Decembers ago. That's stuff that has been moved into the Lisp packages. The stuff in the Attic/ is required for consing up old XEmacs versions like say 20.2. Use the -P (prune empty directory) option to `cvs checkout'. This is the classic signature of having an empty obsolete `packages' directory in the XEmacs core. For the record I use a .cvsrc of: diff -ko rdiff -ko update -ko co -ko -P checkout -ko -P