4. Adding Modules to the XEmacs Distribution

#### This section needs to be filled out.

Warning: The procedure described in the section is subject to change, as it is very stylized and thus a good candidate for further automation.

Modules distributed with XEmacs are placed in the ‘modules’ subdirectory of the root of the source tree. Each module’s code is placed in a separate subdirectory. The build infrastructure for a module consists of a ‘Makefile.in.in’, a ‘configure.ac’, and ‘install-sh’. ‘install-sh’ is a constant, and may simply be copied from an existing module.

Most of the job of building a module is encapsulated in ‘modules/common/Makefile.common’ and in ‘ellcc’. The module’s ‘Makefile.in.in’ normally needs only to define module name and version information, and include ‘modules/common/Makefile.common’. The ‘configure.ac’ is very module-specific, and little can be said about its contents. However, since no logic that depends on XEmacs itself or other modules needs to be present, it is easier to write and maintain than if it were contained in the XEmacs distribution’s ‘configure.ac’.

Modules were previously occasionally built in to the XEmacs binary, on systems where HAVE_SHLIB was determined to be zero by the configure script. Such systems are currently rare. In the interest of maintainability support for this has been removed.

This document was generated on September 26, 2026 using texi2html 1.82.