Michael Sperber <sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de&gt; writes: Stephen> However, according my understanding of something Steve Baur wrote, it Stephen> should be possible to run XEmacs with _nothing_ except the binary Stephen> itself, and at least manage the functionality of MS-Edit under DOS. Stephen> If that is a goal, then crashing just because it can't find any Stephen> packages, or even core Lisp, is not acceptable. Steve? That is correct. With just the core lisp, it's still better than VI, I believe. Yes. Jamie Zawinski and others run XEmacs that way. You should be able to find the bitching about this on c.e.x in DejaNews. Another way to look at it though is to consider this a case of graceful degradation. We should still have warning messages, but if the user knows what he is doing, he should be able to do it. There's two main reasons. You can't ensure that every package you ever wish to have around will be available at dump time. You want to be able to pick up[1] freshly installed packages the same way packages installed at dump time are picked up. You also want to be able to reload the autoloads of packages that have been upgraded.[2] This could be implemented by rescanning the autoloads at startup and reloading autoloads files that weren't present at dump time and reloading out of date autoloads. For a variety of reasons, I suspect this is much slower than just reloading all the autoloads to begin with. Also, there is no clean way we can unload files once they have been loaded. -More- If you happen to touch the timestamp of the installed binary you lose forever after. The easiest and safest way to ensure that all autoloaded stuffs are present and up-to-date is to load them in at run-time. I think loading autoloads at runtime is a win. I think as people gain experience with longer lived binaries (I don't see this happening too much while updates are being made every other day) they will appreciate this feature too. Think about it a second. It's another step in the direction of making the dumped binary less special. Stop XEmacs. Install a bunch of new lisp packages. Restart XEmacs. With the current architecture you are now in an identical situation to what used to require redumping the binary (or recompiling and relinking temacs if the object code is no longer available). The new lisp is bound as tightly to XEmacs as Lisp that was present at dump time. Footnotes: [1] "Pick up" means load the autoloads. [2] If you don't, we can perhaps work out some method of dumping autoloads and then ignoring new stuff in the future.