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+These lisp files should work under recent versions (19 onwards) of
+both Emacs and XEmacs.  See the Octave documentation (info node
+`Emacs') on how to install and use these packages.
+
+These files use the custom package so that user variables can be
+changed easily.  The custom package has been included in Emacs since
+around version 19.34.  If you have an old version of Emacs without the
+custom package, you should get the following error when trying to load
+the octave files:
+
+  Cannot open load file: custom
+
+In this case, you should use the simple replacement custom library
+here, renaming it to custom.el so that Emacs can find it:
+
+% mv custom-old.el custom.el
+
+But remember when you upgrade Emacs to version 20 and beyond, you
+should delete this primitive custom file and use the built-in version
+instead.