• Download
• FAQ
• Mailing lists
• Documentation
• People
• How to help
• Bugs
• Links

• Mailing lists
• Status of Services
• Near Future
• History of XEmacs
• XEmacs vs. GNU Emacs
• Screenshots
• Sites Created With XEmacs
• Year 2000 Statement
• Who Wrote XEmacs?
• XEmacs Contributors
• Website

• Download
• Optional Libraries
• Installation HOWTOs
• Quickstart Package Guide
• Documentation
• Installation resources
• Releases

• XEmacs Packages
• Other Interesting Sites
• Customization Links

• FAQ
• Reporting Bugs
• Troubleshooting resources
• Debugging

• How to help
• Open Issues
• Who Wrote XEmacs?
• XEmacs Contributors
• Dev team responsibilities
• Architecting XEmacs

How to Help

XEmacs Development

As of 5 December 2007, the development mainline (aka version 21.5) has been moved to a Mercurial repository on hg.debian.org from which you may browse the latest checked-in code. Please see the introduction to the XEmacs Mercurial Repository for instructions on its use.

Other XEmacs repositories, including the 21.4 branch, the packages, and the sources for this website, continue to be provided by the CVS repository, which moved from cvs.xemacs.org, hosted by our friends at dotsrc.org, to Alioth.debian.org in November 2009.

If you'd like to help with the XEmacs development effort, do the following:

1. Download the latest releases of 21.4 (the stable branch) or 21.5 (the development mainline, or (better) get the most up-to-date sources from the source repositories. For 21.5, see the introduction to the XEmacs Mercurial Repository and follow the instructions to get an up-to-date tree of the XEmacs 21.5 source. For other resources, such as the 21.4 stable tree, the package tree and the source to this website, see the introduction to the XEmacs CVS Repository and follow the instructions to get an up-to-date trees of those resources.

2. Install it.

3. Join the xemacs-beta mailing list.

4. Find bugs.

5. Fix them.

6. Submit patches to the xemacs-patches mailing list.

   The rules for creating and submitting patches are set forth in etc/BETA (section Creating patches for submission in documentation accessed via M-x describe-beta), or see the web version.

   You may find the cvs-mods perl script useful to create your patches.

   No matter whether you are just getting involved with creating patches or you generate huge amounts of them, patcher is for you. Please install the xemacs-devel package which it is part of. Read its documentation, using C-h C-i patcher from within XEmacs, or use the documentation on the XEmacs website.

XEmacs Packages Development

The development of XEmacs Packages is supported by hourly builds from latest CVS sources. XEmacs Package Smoketest results are readily available.

XEmacs Website Development

This is documented in detail under About XEmacs->Website.

Since the website development model is fully in line with XEmacs development please read that chapter as well.