Martin Buchholz <martin(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: I argue that this is a false statement. XEmacs _cannot_ know everything about the system. Just say that we broke LDAP out into a separately distributed module. Why should the core XEmacs have a configure-time test for all the oddities of the different LDAP implementations? Or why should it check for the existence of 'libghttp' just on the off chance that someone will write a module that uses it? XEmacs knows everything for the lispy side of things, but a module is not going to be really worthwhile unless it interfaces with something XEmacs doesn't know about yet (otherwise, why write it in C unless speed is killing you?) Emacs/W3 used to take advantage of this, and actually uses the same type of thing in w3-cfg.el, but it still cannot give you everything. There needs to be a mixture. -bp