Project:XEmacs/XEmacs on Gentoo

A Brief Overview
XEmacs is a highly customizable open source text editor and application development system.

Overview
Many elisp extensions for XEmacs are distributed as XEmacs packages. Some of these packages are needed for proper operation of XEmacs, such as the package. Others are XEmacs-specific packages of applications that are also otherwise distributed. The packaged versions are known to work with XEmacs and may contains XEmacs-specific enhancements. In a normal XEmacs installation these packages can be installed using the built-in XEmacs package manager. In Gentoo the packages are provided as ebuilds, making updating and maintenance easier. An added benefit is that the  USE flag can be used to pull in relevant XEmacs packages. For example, when emerging with the   USE flag you will also emerge the  packages, enabling ruby support in XEmacs. You can find the list of all packages in the  category.

You may find it cumbersome to install each XEmacs package individually. The upstream solution to that is the distribution of the SUMO archive, which contains all packages in a single archive. Gentoo takes a different approach. You can emerge to install all the XEmacs packages that are also distributed in the SUMO archive. This installs all the individual packages. Using the now-obsolete is deprecated, and last rites will be issued for it shortly. The reason for this particular approach is described in.

Gnome and GTK+ support in XEmacs currently only supports GTK 1.2 and GNOME 1.x. GNOME 1.x is no longer available through portage and GTK 1.2 is deprecated and will be removed some time in the future. For this reason there are no  and   USE flags for XEmacs.

XEmacs 21.5
Upstream development is currently focused on XEmacs 21.5, but this version is currently not yet stable enough for release or day-to-day use. Unfortunately only the 21.5 versions provide proper support for UTF-8, which is becoming more and more a requirement, so we expect to add a 21.5 release to the main tree.

Until that time experimental XEmacs 21.5 ebuilds are available from the official emacs overlay. You can add this overlay to your system using layman.

Introduction
The following information is only relevant to Gentoo developers or other people who want to update or create ebuilds related to XEmacs.

Package to ebuild script
The  ebuilds in portage are kept up-to-date with the released set of packages using a python script called pebuild originally written by Mats Lidell.