I was building XEmacs in the source directory on several different machines, but discovered that I was not keeping the directories consistent. So I moved the sources to a network file system (Coda), and started using --srcdir. I have discovered that (1) building in the source tree, I can run src/xemacs without trouble (2) building with --srcdir=/coda/XEmacs/21.1, running src/xemacs from the build directory or /tmp/XEmacs/Builds/21.1/src/xemacs from /coda/XEmacs/21.1 gives bash-2.04$ /tmp/XEmacs/Builds/21.1/src/xemacs WARNING: Couldn't find obvious defaults for: doc-directory exec-directory lisp-directory Perhaps some directories don't exist, or the XEmacs executable, /tmp/XEmacs/Builds/21.1/src/xemacs is in a strange place? (3) building with --srcdir=/coda/XEmacs/21.1, doing make install, and then running-in-place works fine, either cwd This is bad, obviously. It's going to cause hard to diagnose problems with docstring skew a lot, and similar problems with other stuff from those directories more rarely I would suppose. I guess this is related to Martin's plaint about "can't move hierarchies," but at least to me this --srcdir problem was not an obvious consequence of Martin's observation. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."