John, I'm a long time member of the xemacs beta developers. You are stepping into a group with a long and rich history of discussion about what to do tomorrow. Everyone has their own perspective on what is important -- which is exactly why progress gets made and XEmacs keeps getting better. In spite of first appearances, what you are getting is not a "no way in hell" answer. Every, and I mean every, new idea goes through this process. You just haven't seen the complete, idea life cycle as practiced on xemacs-beta. Good, well thought out pieces emerge from this initial phase. Bad ideas fade away and everyone is saved a lot of wasted effort. You are getting some extra heat because, to be honest, we've had a lot (like nearly a weekly occurance) of cranks that want to convert Emacs into perl or otherwise throw out millions of lines of perfectly good Emacs Lisp code and replace it with the language du jour. That's not going to happen. Some of us don't care for Perl as a language, or don't like/use Mule, or hate Windows but that doesn't stop such things from being added. It is probably reasonable to assume your changes will get incorporated to the core of XEmacs if: (a) they are not Perl specific but can be used to add any extension language; (b) provide a better abstraction then what is being done (we like abstraction); (c) don't have an adverse affect on XEmacs if/when you dissappear and no one else comes forward to support the Perl extensions; (d) the Perl part is completely and utterly isolated to keep it from infecting the Emacs Lisp part. Advice: 1. Subscribe to xemacs-beta 2. Fix bugs so we start to know and trust you. 3. Submit patches that are generic to any extension language 4. Submit perl as a proof of concept. 5. Figure out a way to get other perl people helping you but not bugging us (xemacs-perl(a)xemacs.org?). Good luck, --pete -- Pete Ware ware(a)cis.ohio-state.edu The Ohio State University, CIS Dept http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~ware 2015 Neil Ave, Dreese Labs 774, w/ (614) 292-8501 Columbus, OH 43210 h/ (614) 488-8516