Where is this message coming from and why?

I'm trying to build XEmacs packages from a bare-ass buck-naked binary with no installed packages besides mule-base. What is happening with this error message? For the moment, I'm ignoring the cause of the core dump. Issuing a prompt when running -batch is a programming error. $ make TAR=tar XEMACS=$(pwd)/../xemacs-21.0/src/xemacs ... make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/home/steveb/staging/xemacs-packages/comm/tm' make EMACS=/usr/home/steveb/staging/xemacs-packages/../xemacs-21.0/src/xemacs -C texi info make[3]: Entering directory `/usr/home/steveb/staging/xemacs-packages/comm/tm/texi' /usr/home/steveb/staging/xemacs-packages/../xemacs-21.0/src/xemacs -batch -q -no-site-file tm-ja.texi \ -eval '(unless (featurep (quote mule)) (kill-emacs 0))' \ -l texinfmt -f texinfo-format-buffer \ -eval '(setq file-coding-system (quote iso-2022-7))' \ -eval '(save-buffer 0)' No mailcrypt; can't verify package-get DB signature, continue? (yes or no) Typing "Yes" at the prompt results in a coredump. Fatal error: assertion failed, file event-tty.c, line 145, c Fatal error (6). ... uname -a: BSD/OS camelot-soft.camelot-soft.com 3.0 BSDI BSD/OS 3.0 Kernel #0: Thu Jul 17 23:30:01 PDT 1997 root＠camelot-soft.camelot-soft.com:/usr/src/sys/compile/CAMELOT i386 ./configure '--cflags=-O' '--with-mule' '--without-x11' '--prefix=/usr/home/steveb/staging' XEmacs 21.0 "Pyrenean-pre9" configured for `i386-pc-bsdi3.0'. Where should the build process find the source code? /usr/home/steveb/staging/xemacs-21.0 What installation prefix should install use? /usr/home/steveb/staging What operating system and machine description files should XEmacs use? `s/bsdos3.h' and `m/intel386.h' What compiler should XEmacs be built with? gcc -O Should XEmacs use the GNU version of malloc? yes Should XEmacs use the relocating allocator for buffers? yes What window system should XEmacs use? none Compiling in native sound support. Compiling in support for Berkeley DB. Compiling in support for GNU DBM. Compiling in Mule (multi-lingual) support. Compiling in DLL support. movemail will use "flock" for locking mail spool files.