Re: Xft

The build requirements are really not that onerous. I don't have any experience with either system, so I don't speak authoritatively and I'm not pushing either option, but here's what I've found out: SCons depends on just Python (already installed in all Linux distributions) and CMake has no additional requirements. Both systems are available pre-packaged for Gentoo, Fedora 9, Debian/Ubuntu and apparently cygwin, so the overhead for a person wishing to build an XEmacs that would use them is not high. I don't know about pre-packaged versions for Windows or Mac OS X, but both claim to run and build (natively) for those environments. The tradeoff seems to be XEmacs build maintainer time (and sanity) vs a small, possibly zero, user/builder overhead. (It turns out that both were installed on my Gentoo and Fedora systems.) Since I'm not the XEmacs build maintainer, officially I don't care. That being said, I'm partial to the idea of replacing a build environment based on make and autotools. As a person with a passing interest in programming languages, I'd prefer SCons because it uses Python, a full-fledged, modern, widely-used, multi-paradigm, programming environment that comes with many, many libraries with even more available as add-ons. But, as I said, I'll defer to those who are directly affected by the choice of build system: it's not my call (just as Mercurial wasn't).