My XEmacs can't find its packages

Alan Mackenzie writes: There was a change in the middle of the 21.5 series to improve FHS conformance. XEmacs now looks for packages in $prefix/share/xemacs by default, not $prefix/lib/xemacs. This is documented (correctly) in the User Guide (C-h i d m xemacs RET), node "Startup Paths". Unfortunately, in other places in the FAQ, User Guide, and Lispref it's inaccurate with respect to the new more FHS conformant layout (issue790). If you want XEmacs to look in $prefix/lib/xemacs, it's probably best to configure XEmacs with --with-system-packages=$prefix/lib/xemacs. There's also an environment variable EMACSPACKAGEPATH, but it's not very easy to use. Because if you *don't* specify the configure option, it's all computed at runtime relative to the xemacs binary, and the packages found are added directly to load-path, more or less. The actual relevant identifier is the *function* `paths-find-emacs-roots', but the implementation is rather complex. The idea is to unify treatment of the package root and the core root. It works very well in many applications (in particular, it makes /opt style packaging very easy), but not so well for you. That I don't know. There's a fair amount of it in the FAQ, the User Guide, and the Lispref, and on the website. Are you just not looking in Info, perhaps? A lot of it is inaccurate with respect to the newly FHS-comforming defaults, though. Because it wouldn't help you anyway; it counts from the {xemacs,mule,site}-packages level, but these are already below the emacs-root, which is normally a computed value in any case. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta