Actually, two failures! One when patching up and another when installing from scratch. Patched up from pre12. Configure and build went fine, but an attempt to list installed packages (Options->Customize->List Packages") failed with the messages: Loading package-ui... generating package customizations... Loading finder... Loading finder...done Wrong type argument: stringp, nil This worked fine with pre12, but only after installing the [URGENT PATCH]. When I patched from pre12 to "Norwegian", I got an error that the patches to package-get and packages-ui were already installed. Then I tried installation from scratch. Restored the xemacs-21.0 tar file and the info and elc files. checking host system type... alphaev56-dec-osf4.0d checking whether ln -s works... yes checking the configuration name Invalid configuration `alphaev56-dec-osf4.0d': machine `alphaev56-dec' not recognized I gave a quick look at configure and I don't understand how this happened. It looks right! Did a patch I had installed not make the actual source even though I had it? case "$canonical" in sparc-*-* ) machine=sparc ;; alpha*-*-* ) machine=alpha ;; and case "$canonical" in *-*-linux* ) opsys=linux ;; *-*-netbsd* ) opsys=netbsd ;; *-*-openbsd* ) opsys=openbsd ;; *-*-nextstep* ) opsys=nextstep ;; *-*-vms ) opsys=vms ;; *-dec-osf1.3 | *-dec-osf2* ) opsys=decosf1-3 ;; *-dec-osf1.2 | *-dec-osf1* ) opsys=decosf1-2 ;; *-dec-osf3.[2-9] ) opsys=decosf3-2 ;; *-dec-osf3* ) opsys=decosf3-1 ;; *-dec-osf4* ) opsys=decosf4-0 ;; Can someone better at shell see why this is happening and why didn't it happen with the patched version? Unfortunately I had to delete the patched version to have room for the full one and can't compare the configure scripts. R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman(a)es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634