With the recent talk about things PUI I thought I'd pass along some news from SXEmacs... A little while ago I committed a changeset to my SXEmacs repo[1] that makes it possible to "bootstrap" PUI without the need for any pre-installed packages. No, we're not bundling EFS and xemacs-base with the core distribution. :-) `pui-bootstrap' uses SXEmacs' FFI[2] and libcurl to download EFS and xemacs-base. Once EFS and xemacs-base are installed, `pui-bootstrap' asks the user if they want to install any more packages. If so, `pui-list-packages' is called and used in the normal way (using EFS). At this point, we only bootstrap PUI like this. Later on we'll probably move all of PUI to FFI/curl which will mean we won't be restricted to FTP. In case you're wondering... $ ldd $(which sxemacs)|grep libcurl || echo ha ha, tricked ya! ha ha, tricked ya! :-) Footnotes: [1] See X-Arch-Repo header [2] Foreign Function Interface -- |---<Steve Youngs>---------------<GnuPG KeyID: A94B3003>---| | I am Dyslexic of Borg. | | Fusistance is retile. Your arse will be laminated. | |------------------------------------&lt;steve(a)sxemacs.org&gt;---|