From xemacs-m  Mon Apr 14 08:40:49 1997
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Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 13:40:35 GMT
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From: "Tomasz J. Cholewo" <tjchol01@mecca.spd.louisville.edu>
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Subject: SGI binary kit incompatibilities
X-Mailer: VM 6.24 under 20.1 XEmacs Lucid (beta14)

A weakness in unexelfsgi causes that XEmacs dumped on IRIX crashes after
patching up system libraries (to say nothing about OS upgrades).  For
example xemacs-19.15-mips-sgi-irix6.3.tar.gz distribution crashes on
recent O2 computers as taken out of the box (irix6.3 with patches from
February).  I think that `temacs' is still mostly portable between 5.3,
6.2, 6.3 and 6.4.

The long term solution is to fix the dump process to make it less
dependent on system internals.  For the time being we should distribute
`temacs' with a script that will allow a user to dump a new xemacs every
time libraries or OS change.  This way we probably could limit the
number of binary distributions for IRIX to two (5.3 and 6.2) or maybe
even just one (5.3).  

I found this idea at http://reality.sgi.com/ariel/freeware/ which has a
distribution of xemacs-19.14 containing such a script.  Please, if you
plan to make a binary distribution of 20.1 for IRIX have a look at this
and adapt this script to our conventions.

Tom

