On 18 Feb 2001 at 19:26:41 +1000, Steve Youngs <youngs(a)xemacs.org&gt; wrote: How about getting rid of package-index altogether? The package names are very regular in form, so it shouldn't be too hard to parse them out of a file list from FTP. Something like this should do it: (defun make-package-list () "Make a list of package names and versions from an FTP directory listing in the current buffer." (let (list) (while (search-forward "-pkg.tar.gz" nil t) (search-backward "-") (let* ((version-end (point)) (name-end (search-backward "-")) (version-start (1+ name-end)) (package-version (buffer-substring version-start version-end)) package-name) (skip-syntax-backward "^ ") (setq package-name (buffer-substring (point) name-end) list (nconc list (cons (list package-name package-version) nil))) (end-of-line))) list)) Then you would want to scan for duplicate package names, and just keep the one with the highest version number. That way, you would get a list of whatever your FTP server actually has. Does this approach have any merit? -- Jerry James