Sam Steingold <sds(a)goems.com&gt; writes: Why? So you use --package-path=/usr/src/xemacs/lisp. You'll need to have lisp/* etc/* package-info/* dirs under that. You cannot just have the sources. This is not layout in the CVS. Moreover you CANNOT run the packages in place. You can however "make install" the packages from the package source tree to /usr/src/xemacs/lisp. I recommend using 'cp -s' to save on disk space. I use that to run pgnus releases 'in place' You can run XEmacs in place but not the packages (or you would basic have to rewrite the package scanner in your site-start) . The packages must be in a tree of the form lisp/pack1/*.el? lisp/pack2/*.el? lisp/pack3/*.el? pkginfo/MANIFEST.pack1 pkginfo/MANIFEST.pack2 pkginfo/MANIFEST.pack3 etc/pack1/* .. It just because you want to shoehorn the packages in a tree where they don't fit. Yes the package system and its docs are still immature, this is main reason 21.0 is not released yet. AfAIK TFM contains zero info about how to build packages from source so it is no surprise you couldn't figure it out. So it is not presumptuous to say that just to expect that everyhting works perfectly in a beta. Sadly however given as things are now I guess building the packages from source will be neither much easier nor much better documented when the release comes. Jan