If you have decided to build XEmacs (XEmacs on this wiki) from source, you must be aware of the XEmacsPackageSystem?. The easiest is to get all packages at once, the so called sumo-tarball.
Here are the instructions to build XEmacs without MULE on a GNU/Linux system.
In your XEmacs mirror site, download the following files:
From either the stable or the gamma (nearly stable) directories, get an XEmacs tarball. It is called xemacs-<version>.tar.gz, eg. xemacs-21.4.6.tar.gz.
From the packages directory, get xemacs-sumo.tar.gz. This will automatically be the latest released tarball with all packages included.
Unpack both as root, for example in /usr/local/src. This will give you two directories, xemacs-<version> and xemacs-packages.
I will assume you will want to use stow to install into /usr/local. That is why we build using the /usr/local prefix, but install using the /usr/local/stow/xemacs prefix. Stow will then link all the files into /usr/local. If you don’t want to use stow, do not provide a prefix to the make install command and skip the remaining instructions.
Enter the xemacs-<version> directory, and then run:
./configure make make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/xemacs cd /usr/local/stow/xemacs
Now you will need to resolve some conflicts if you have GnuEmacs, GnuClient installed as well as XEmacs. In my case, I decided to leave the Emacs version of all files, so I delete the XEmacs version here, before stowing in /usr/local.
rm /usr/local/stow/xemacs/man/man1/etags.1 rm /usr/local/stow/xemacs/man/man1/ctags.1 rm /usr/local/stow/xemacs/bin/etags rm /usr/local/stow/xemacs/bin/ctags rm /usr/local/stow/xemacs/man/man1/gnuserv.1 rm /usr/local/stow/xemacs/bin/gnuclient rm /usr/local/stow/xemacs/bin/gnudoit rm /usr/local/stow/xemacs/bin/b2m rm /usr/local/stow/xemacs/bin/rcs-checkin
And finally:
stow xemacs
Go to the parent directory of xemacs-packages. In my example, that would be /usr/local/src. You want the xemacs-packages to reside in /usr/local/lib/xemacs.
Without stow, you can just do the right thing:
mv xemacs-packages /usr/local/lib/xemacs
With stow, things get a bit more complicated:
mkdir -p /usr/local/stow/xemacs-packages/lib/xemacs mv xemacs-packages /usr/local/stow/xemacs-packages/lib/xemacs cd /usr/local/stow stow xemacs-packages