I understand that position, and it makes sense. I think that if an add on is essential, though, it should be included with what you download to get the application running. Is there any reason xemacs-base (and efs?) can't be bundled with the XEmacs tarball and installed wherever packages get installed when xemacs is installed? Then it would still be a package and could be upgraded independently of XEmacs itself. I suppose the install process would have to ensure that a newer version of xemacs-base wasn't already installed, but that doesn't sound impossible. I apologize in advance if I'm making wrong assumptions; I've only read vague rumblings about this issue. I installed 21.1 awhile ago and don't remember what difficulties I may have faced. Reid