seems that the Makefile is _very conservative_ in its promises of disk space savings --- my results are for linux, but gzip is gzip is gzip, no? % make install [...] If you would like to save approximately 2M of disk space, do make gzip-el or you may run /home/gb/src/xemacs/lib-src/gzip-el.sh lispdir from the command line. Where lispdir is where the lisp files were installed, i.e., /usr/local/lib/xemacs-21.2-b37/lisp % df . ; make gzip-el > /dev/null ; df . Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda6 1400864 1178916 150788 89% / Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda6 1400864 1174628 155076 88% / % expr 155076 - 150788 4288 %