Re: Failure to build mew

vin> I'm a little confused. Shouldn't I be able to _build_ vin> bbdb even if I don't have apel _installed_? Yes. You should not need APEL _installed_. BBDB may not even need the APEL sources, but the build process does since apel is in REQUIRES. For the record: (1) XEmacs.rules ensures that XEmacs is -vanilla -no-autoloads. (2) package-compile.el clears the load-path ... (3) ... adds the core lisp to it and loads core autoloads ... (4) ... adds the _source_ directories of packages in $(REQUIRES) and loads their autoloads ... (5) ... and then byte-compiles. The intention of the code is clearly that (1) if the APEL sources are not in xemacs-packages/libs/apel, you should get an auto-autoloads load error, and (2) an xemacs using package-compile.el should not be able to find an installed APEL. But mew is buggy. The problem is that mew uses the ee-vile PRELOADS variable to load poe.el instead of putting apel in REQUIRES. This means that XEmacs searches the load-path for the "-l poe.el" flag at a time when load-path has not yet been cleaned up. Since poe.el defmacro's it needs to be loaded at compile-time. But the mew code doesn't #'require it, anywhere. This is a bug in mew. Vin's solution is rm -rf comm/mew. If Steve wants mew to build reliably (ie, not picking up random installed APELs), he needs to remove the PRELOADS definitions in comm/mew/Makefile, add apel to REQUIRES, and add a (require 'poe) to comm/mew/*.el. (I'm tempted to say the right answer is rm -rf comm/mew libs/apel on general principles but ....) Similar things should be done for every library with PRELOADS defined, I think. I think that, because of the way APEL works, probably all autoload cookies should be deleted from all APEL libraries. APEL should be explicitly #'required by any code that needs it. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."