By the way, having moved the irrelevant directories out of
$package_root as per my previous message, most of the packages did get
properly installed by package-get-update-all (some of them many
times), but others did not.
Unfortunately, I've already exited the xemacs I did the update with,
so I don't have the trace. Sorry....
There still seems to be a need for an automatic way to pick up the
latest package list; package-get-base.el-21.0-b38-pre3 in the package
binaries directory has xemacs-base 1.19 in it, but the
package-get-base.el updated by CVS had only xemacs-base 1.18. Really,
this particular file probably should not be distributed with the
sources.
Or the one distributed with the source should look in the package
mirror site for a more recent one.