Announcing XEmacs 20.4 XEmacs 20.4 is now available. This is a version of Emacs derived from Emacs version 19 from the Free Software Foundation. This is a minor upgrade from 20.3, containing many bugfixes. If you are using XEmacs 19, XEmacs 20.0 or XEmacs 20.2 in any flavor (including off of the Sun CD) you should definitely consider upgrading to 20.4. XEmacs 20.4 built without Mule should be as fast or faster than XEmacs 19.13. The XEmacs/Mule support has been only seriously tested in a Japanese locale, and no doubt many problems still remain. The support for ISO-8859-x and Japanese is fairly strong. MULE support comes at a price -- about a 30% slowdown from 19.16. We're making progress on improving performance and XEmacs 20.4 compiled without Mule (which is the default) is much faster than XEmacs 19.16. You can get XEmacs via anonymous FTP from FTP.XEMACS.ORG (207.96.122.8). Please see README.MIRRORS for mirror FTP sites. ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/xemacs-20.4/ A complete list of features and improvements (NEWS), the complete list of mirror sites, the current FAQ, and several other XEmacs related items can be found at the XEmacs World Wide Web page: http://www.xemacs.org/ Total disk space requirements are as follows: without Mule with Mule Unpacked distrib 76 Mb 90 Mb Compilation 102 Mb 103 Mb Due to increasing size, the source distribution has been split into four files. README This file. README.executables Instructions for selecting and installing a precompiled binary kit. README.jp These instructions in EUC encoded Japanese. README.de These instructions in German. xemacs-20.4.tar.gz The core source distribution. This file is about 13 megabytes and contains the minimum possible source code to build XEmacs. If you are on a slow and expensive connection, you might wish to build the online manuals and the bytecompiled lisp code yourself. xemacs-20.4-elc.tar.gz This file contains all the standard bytecompiled lisp. If you have a reasonable net connection, download this file with the core distribution and untar it in the same directory. xemacs-20.4-info.tar.gz This file contains the TeXinfo processed online manuals. Note: if you wish to build these yourself, you will need a very new `makeinfo' program from the most recent texinfo distribution. At least makeinfo-1.68 (from GNU texinfo 3.11) is required. If you download this file, untar it in the same directory you untarred the core distribution. xemacs-20.4-mule.tar.gz This file contains all of the Mule support code, both C source and Lisp and supporting files. If you wish to use the Mule internationalization features you will need it. Untar this file in the same directory you untarred the core distribution. Don't forget to set "binary" mode when transferring these files. Unpack them with some variation of the command "gunzip -c xemacs-20.4.tar.gz | tar -pvxf -". Thanks to the tireless efforts of Jason Mastaler and the kit builders (enumerated in the READMEs), there are binary kits again for this XEmacs release. As of this announcement, a number of binary kits are already available. Please check the FTP site for details. More should become available over the next week given sufficient interest. sparc-sun-solaris rs6000-ibm-aix i386-unknown-freebsd i386-pc-solaris i386-pc-linux i386-pc-bsdi hppa1.1-hp-hpux Additional platforms will become available during the next week.