[cc'ed back to xemacs-beta to show signs of life :-(] Is that necessary? At the moment the pdepends.mk express the interdepencies between the different packages, so they only make sense from the directory one level above (i.e. from the Makefile in xemacs-packages). For instance, say haskell-mode/pdepends.mk says ./haskell-mode/autoloads.target: ./dired/autoloads.target mail-lib/autoloads.target xemacs-base/autoloads.target edit-utils/autoloads.target ./haskell-mode/compile.target: ./dired/compile.target mail-lib/compile.target xemacs-base/compile.target edit-utils/compile.target which says that dired, mail-lib, xemacs-base and edit-utils must be compiled before haskell-mode. This kind of information only makes sense from a directory that sees all this packages. Ideally you want to this from the toplevel so you can have dependencies between mule packages and normal packages So you could argue that instead of cd xemacs-packages/haskell-mode make compile you should do cd xemacs-packages make haskell-mode/compile.target as the latter rebuilds the dependencies if needed. I am afraid so :-( It is important they get rebuild from the Makefiles that use them, which is AFAICS the case. See this rule in iterate.rules $(DEPENDS_FILES): %$(DEPENDS_FILE_NAME): %Makefile ../XEmacs.rules $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) -C $(*D) TARGET_BASE=$(dir $(*D)) \ $(DEPENDS_FILE_NAME) The pdepend.mk stuff is there so that there is only one place that contains the dependency information, which is the REQUIRES line in the package Makefile. This used to be hardcoded in multiple places, or the information would be simply ignored. Ideally in a package build you should NEVER see ".el file newer than .elc" file warnings. I agree this all very hacky, but it took quite a bit of effort to get right. This way Make can figure out all the proper dependencies with out relying on the fact that you called the toplevel make autoload before make bytecompile etc... For instance, this rule $(BYTECOMPILE_TARGETS): %bytecompile.target: %autoloads.target tells Make that autoloads must be made before bytecompiles, therefore haskell-mode/byte-compile.target depends haskell-mode/autoload.target depends on dired/autoload.target and on dired/bytecompile.target ensuring that whatever happends, autoloads for the dependencies are always generated first, and that dependencies are alwyas compiled before the package. I see that this line has recently been commented out.. Why? Was there some problem. This stuff is important to allow a clean bootstrap to work i.e. cvs checkout xemacs cvs checkout packages build xemacs (don't install any packages) build packages with the xemacs just compiled above. Similarly I always build with VANILLA = -vanilla -no-autoloads so that any existing autoloads from already installed packages don't get used by accident. I think -no-autoloads should be the default. Hopefully thus clears this up? Merry christmas to you all, I hope you will see more of me next year, Jan