I've narrowed the culprit down to the patch at the end of this message. At least in my situation, and it happens both here at home and at work, trying to do a "make bindist" will quite often fail. This happens when I've run it once, and have package-info files in the package tree. I believe what happens is that the package source dirs are at the beginning of load-path, and xemacs tries to load the package-info file in the current directory instead of the package-info.el or .elc that is in my installed xemacs lisp directory. Looking through the mailing list archive I see at least one other person with the same problem you basically end up with an error like this: Symbol's function definition is void: xemacs-base xemacs exiting . gmake[2]: *** [package-info] Error 255 gmake[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/users/support/nk/cvs/xemacs-packages/libs/xemacs-base' gmake[1]: *** [xemacs-base/bindist.target] Error 2 gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/users/support/nk/cvs/xemacs-packages/libs' gmake: *** [libs/bindist.target] Error 2 I'm really surprised more people aren't getting messed up by this. I really think the following patch should be reverted. Jeff 2001-02-06 Vin Shelton <acs(a)xemacs.org&gt; * XEmacs.rules (package-info): Load 'package-info' instead of 'package-info.el'. Without the following patch, I can not run 'make bindist' to build the packages. Did it used to be that the package-info target was not run? I don't see how the XEmacs.rules currently in CVS could ever have worked, yet it's been around since last October. - vin --- XEmacs.rules~ Sat Oct 21 11:59:34 2000 +++ XEmacs.rules Sun Feb 4 13:31:34 2001 ＠＠ -129,7 +129,7 ＠＠ package-info : package-info.in Makefile $(AUTOLOAD_PATH)/_pkg.el \ $(pkg_tar).gz $(pkg_tar).bz2 $(XEMACS) $(VANILLA) -batch \ - -l package-info.el -f batch-update-package-info \ + -l package-info -f batch-update-package-info \ '$(VERSION)' $(PKG_TAR_GZ) \ '$(REQUIRES)' \ '$(AUTHOR_VERSION)' '$(MAINTAINER)' '$(CATEGORY)'