Martin> that it is entirely natural that people would omit including the Martin> packages, even if they are professional GNU software maintainers such Martin> as inhabit Cygnus. Also, people who did try to follow the Martin> instructions and use documented interfaces to install packages after Martin> installing the `core' XEmacs often failed (and reverted to 20.4, since Martin> that actually `worked'). I wouldn't exactly say that. Of course, being behind a firewall with an ftp that efs doesn't like, I've never had to really deal with packages. I just download the sumo tarballs whenever I feel like it, or the individual packages if I need them. However, I think the whole package stuff would work better if it used http instead of ftp to get the packages. "Everyone" has a working http access. ftp is much more difficult, and, in my case, unusable. (It works just fine from the command line, but not via efs.) I wish I had time (and knowledge) to make the package stuff use http instead of efs.... Ray