[It's time, I think, to move this to xemacs-beta] Michael Sperber <sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de&gt; writes in xemacs-review(a)xemacs.org: sb> Michael Sperber <sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de&gt; writes in xemacs-review(a)xemacs.org: sb> ... These are strong words. If things are really this fucked up then they should be fixed. All of the changes I've made have been fairly conservative. If we really needed to, it wouldn't take more than perhaps a day to undo everything and return to a 20.4-style source tree. I pray we do not do this. Recall that we went through that exercise to create 20.3. When InfoDock sources get released in a few weeks, you should probably take a look at how it uses packaging. It is a hybrid system, half-way between monolithic 20.4 and packaged 21.x. sb> Then how would you have done it? This was on the old xemacs-beta-discuss, right? I no longer have archives but I recall the message you are referring to. I thought long and hard about it as I first started coding things up. I didn't know about the coding part. I vaguely recall[1] you mentioning that you would code it yourself if no one else was going to do it, but then you disappeared for awhile. If I had seen any code whatsoever, I wouldn't have started a variant implementation. It's not like there has been a massive investment of coding anyway. Nearly all of the work has been organizational in nature. I know. I started to deal with this via an ill-defined `package-provide' and `package-require' that never worked out. O.K. O.K. O.K. I suppose. I really, really don't like code that decides what to do based on an Emacs version. Yes. Right. I've never been happy about this currently works. Share with us your thoughts on what The Right Thing to do is. Perhaps you won't have to code it yourself. The MANIFEST files were an accidental feature. There certainly isn't a requirement that they be kept in synch, but it makes things somewhat easier if they are. That would be a departure from how things worked in XEmacs 20.x and that is why I didn't do it that way. I am not adverse to changing things now, and so long as the programming interface remains the same or very similar, it shouldn't be a lot of work to migrate to a different layout. I like a plug-n-play XEmacs (and InfoDock for that matter) that I can strip of useless bloat I will never use. I like that a lot. I recognize there are some problems left to solve, but I think things are better off now than they were in 20.x and the hardest work has been done. The main problems are ones that existed in a monolithic XEmacs too. Fine tuning things so it actually works well under the conditions you mention above shouldn't be impossible (IMHO). Footnotes: [1] If one really trusts a blonde's memory. Gravity exists so that blondes don't forget which way to get out of bed in the morning. :-) -- 雨降って地固まる (Adversity builds character)