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.