Gregory Neil Shapiro <gshapiro(a)sendmail.org&gt; writes: Unfortunately this is a design problem combined with misconception form your side [probably caused by lack of documentation]. Any subdir of a known package hierarchy NOT in packages-special-base-regexp is ALSO a package hierarchy[1]. When installing a package, the package tools default to where xemacs-base is. Unfortunately that won't work if we are installing xemacs-base. Therefore the tools take (last late-packages). This will typically be the subdirectory as you mentioned. I don't think it has anything to do with the current working directory, see above. By XEmacs thinking it _is_ a package hierarchy. Moreover it should work with the packages installed there. It may be ugly, but it should work. That should not be necessary. The most important thing is to get xemacs-base and mule-base in the right place after that the rest should just work. Have you read README.packages? Jan Footnotes: [1] I think this is a mistake.