Re: XEmacs-Beta Digest, Vol 74, Issue 9

steven Mitchell writes: I don't think there's a need for that. I'm pretty sure you got an XEmacs that ran and was far superior to Notepad for basic text editing, but it may not have been able to find packages and probably didn't have some features you consider essential. If your recall is accurate, and you run across it again, please report it, because it's absolutely false. Lisp is by definition platform- independent. Some features may not be available on some platforms, but these should fail gracefully on those platforms (ie, without crashing XEmacs and providing an appropriate error message). It is true that compiled Lisp in the current SUMOs may not work with XEmacs 21.1 and earlier, because both the Lisp language and the byte- compiler have changed. I suspect that's what you're thinking of. But this will also affect any compiled packages. It's also true that loadable modules (compiled C code implementing Lisp functions) are not well-supported on all platforms. But that's a different issue, and we don't distribute compiled modules or support executables (eg, etags, movemail) via the package system. There is only one SUMO and only one Mule SUMO, and they are suitable for any XEmacs >= 21.4.0. Not at all. It assumes you want the packages you need to be functional. The reason we suggest the SUMOs is that the dependency graph is quite complex. Unless you know exactly what you're doing, or really only want absolute minimum functionality, you are very likely to end up with a non-functional set of packages because of missing dependencies. Of course an experienced user will be able to track down missing dependencies, but it's not something that is very enjoyable. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta