Building gnus 5.8.3+ on XEmacs

Sorry for a perhaps stupid question. How do XEmacs users build recent gnus packages under XEmacs? Since 5.8.3 and up through the current CVS version, building gnus fails because I don't have timer.el (which lives in fsf-compat) installed. I do have a workaround, because it so happens I have a full XEmacs packages build tree, so I can just set EMACSLOADPATH to point to the built location of the fsf-compat package, and I can then build, install and run gnus. Do I need the fsf-compat package at run-time? It appears not, but why do I need it at compile time? I dimly recall this issue's having been discussed on the ding list, and I thought someone was planning on removing / reworking this dependency to be more XEmacs-friendly. TIA, vin