Charles G Waldman writes: Check whether the variable is bound if that is all that the program needs to know. But if a more general question is being asked such as 'is MULE support available?', then use a broader check like (featurep 'mule). Some programs will set variables unconditionally so you can't rely on (boundp 'buffer-file-coding-system) meaning MULE or file-coding support is available.

cgw> OK, thanks for that answer. It would be clearly be better to cgw> check for (featurep 'file-coding) rather than (boundp cgw> 'buffer-file-coding-system) cgw> But I fear that this check may need to be added in a bunch of cgw> places in the package lisp! Agreed. I think your strategy of defining a default of 'raw-text-unix if file coding is not compiled in is appropriate. It has the correct semantics. Note that this is exactly what we do for the specifier tags at the end of lisp/specifier.el. Anyway, we're moving in the direction of making file-coding (but not Mule, yet!) the default configuration. The main thing to do is to audit the code for (incorrect) checks for (boundp 'buffer-file-coding-system) and the like whose semantics is intended to be (featurep 'file-coding). -- 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."

Charles G Waldman writes: wasnt a versioning system being discussed for xemacs-packages ?? could a system be put in place for requiring a certain version of XEmacs to run a specific version of a package like a require 21.x.x would have to put it in the package-get system too just an idea -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Brown Web Programmer/Sys Admin/Apache Admin Education Development Web peter(a)edw.com.au www.edw.com.au rendhalver(a)users.sourceforge.net -------------------------------------------------------------------------