My first attempt got spam-trapped...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Vin Shelton" <acs@alumni.princeton.edu>
Date: Dec 28, 2008 10:36 PM
Subject: xemacs-base now required to build
To: "XEmacs Beta" <xemacs-beta@xemacs.org>

Greetings -

In the process of generating the 21.4.22 release, I realized that the xemacs-base package is now required to build xemacs-21.4, because of these lines in lisp/autoload.el:

      (defvar autoload-make-autoload-operators
    '(defun define-skeleton defmacro define-derived-mode define-generic-mode
      easy-mmode-define-minor-mode easy-mmode-define-global-mode
      define-minor-mode defun* defmacro*)
    "`defun'-like operators that use `autoload' to load the library.")
     
      (defvar autoload-make-autoload-complex-operators
    '(easy-mmode-define-minor-mode easy-mmode-define-global-mode
      define-minor-mode)
    "`defun'-like operators to macroexpand before using `autoload'.")

easy-mmode comes from xemacs-base, and if you try to build xemacs-21.4 without an xemacs-base package, you get this error:

Building finder database ...(done)
rm -f lisp/auto-autoloads.el
/home/acs/xemacs-21.4-2008-12-28/src/xemacs -batch -no-autoloads \
                -l autoload -f batch-update-directory lisp
Cannot open load file: easy-mmode
xemacs exiting
.
make: *** [lisp/auto-autoloads.el] Error 255

21.5 doesn't have this problem because there's a copy of easy-mmode.el in lisp.

What do you think is the right solution to this?  Should we accept the limitation that xemacs-base is required in order to build 21.4 and document it somehow in INSTALL?  (... patches welcome).  Should I copy a version of easy-mmode.el into lisp/? (Yuck)

Please send your thoughts to the list.

Regards,
  Vin