Fighting with packages!

I've been playing with XEmacs 21.0 in beta and pre-release for a few weeks and I continue to think the package system needs some serious attention. I just got caught in a Catch-22 with my installation. I decided to install 21.0 "Zhong Wei" from scratch, just to see if it would all work. That includes a "make install" which I normally don't do for test versions until they get really close to release. Here is the blow-by-blow of my attempt. 1. Restored the tar files (including info and elc). 2. Configured (with CDE and tooltalk). 3. Ran make. No errors. 4. Sent in [Success] report to xemacs-beta. 5. Attempted to load packages. (efs not installed, so no-go.) 6. Get efs tar and restore in the xemacs directory. 7. Attempted to load packages. (efs not loaded, so no-go.) 8. Loaded efs. 9. Attempted to load packages. (efs needs comint which is not loaded. No-go.) 10. Use package-get-package-provider to find that comint in in xemacs-base. 11. Manually download xemacs-base. 12. Attempted to load packages. ("No package path" error. No-go.) 13. Gave up on "package-get" and manually loaded packages from ftp site. Most everything works although I now must manually "require" most everything. 14. Attempt "make install". (tooltalk not loaded, so will not install.) 15. Manually load tooltalk. (Still says tooltalk is not loaded.) I can't get package-get to work. "No package path" does not help much. And it requires set-up including manually getting and loading efs and some definition of "package path" which I still lack. Because "check-features" uses "package-require" which only sees packages loaded by package-get, I'm frustrated. I will now look at "package-get" and try to figure out what "package path" is and get it defined. This is not, as best I can tell, documented anywhere. I'm especially concerned with efs since it MUST be installed be installed for package-get to work. And xemacs-base, which must be installed for efs to work. I would suggest that: 1. All modules needed for package-get either be part of the base install or that detailed instruction be included in INSTALL on how to bootstrap the operation. 2. The "Packages" node in info be expanded to provide information on how to find and install binary packages. I'm willing to contribute to the latter and possibly the former, once I figure out how it's really supposed to work. R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman(a)es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634