12 February 2001

This is EPL version 0.7.  EPL (Emacs Perl) lets you control Emacs and
XEmacs using Perl as an alternative to Emacs Lisp.

EPL is a replacement for Perlmacs that uses pipes instead of
embedding.  This allows it to work with different Emacs, XEmacs, and
Perl versions without recompilation.  See
http://john-edwin-tobey.org/perlmacs/ for news and the latest version.

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
  General Public License for more details.

EPL requires at least Perl 5.004 and prefers 5.005 or higher.  It is
known to work with Emacs 19 (partly) and 20 and XEmacs 21, but with
the caveat that Lisp references to Perl data must be freed explicitly
or result in a memory leak.  Under GNU Emacs 21.0.x, this restriction
does not exist.  I expect to get rid of it with XEmacs too someday.
GNU Emacs 20 probably will always have it.


INSTALLATION

If you have XEmacs 21 or newer, you can install EPL as an XEmacs
package.  Simply create a ~/.xemacs/packages directory and unzip the
most recent epl-N.NN-pkg.tar.gz file there.  To view the Perl module
documentation, try:

    perldoc -F ~/.xemacs/packages/etc/perllib/Emacs/Lisp.pm
    perldoc -F ~/.xemacs/packages/etc/perllib/Emacs.pm

The examples should work without further ado.

If you do not have XEmacs or want to install the Perl modules in
standard locations, unzip the highest-numbered Emacs-EPL-N.N.tar.gz,
change directory to Emacs-EPL-N.N, and run these commands:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make install

Do not run `make test' unless you have GNU Emacs 20 or higher
installed.

Then copy the Lisp files from the lisp directory to where Emacs looks
for libraries.  Byte-compile them if you like.  Load perl.el in Emacs
with `M-x load-file' or the equivalent.  Refer to the Emacs manual for
details about loading libraries and byte-compilation.

See the Emacs::Lisp documentation and epl.info for further
information.


COPYING

EPL is copyright (C) 1998-2001 by John Tobey,
<jtobey@john-edwin-tobey.org>.

You may distribute EPL under the terms of either the Perl Artistic
License (as distributed with Perl 5.6.0) or the GNU General Public
License.

  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with this program; see the file COPYING.  If not, write to the
  Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston,
  MA 02111-1307 USA


Enjoy!
-John
