Adam Sjøgren wrote:
> Oh, I can - evaluating:

>   (message (format "%s" ?\u00AB))

> in both mule and nomule XEmacs 21.4.22 gives me:

>   Symbol's value as variable is void: 00AB

Yes, XEmacs 21.4 doesn't support such read sequence.

> I wonder if it would work to simply replace ?\u00AB with 171.

?\« is ok for XEmacs 21.4 if it loads the Mule-UCS package that
provides the utf-8 coding system.  To use it, do:

(require 'un-define)

But as for loading gnus-spec.el, there's another problem for
XEmacs 21.4; the coding cookie, put in the `Local Variables'
section at the end of the file, won't be effective.  So,
gnus-spec.el will not necessarily be loaded as a utf-8 file.
AFAIK, the only effective coding cookie is the one put at
the beginning of a file.

A patch that involves those consideration is below.

BTW, isn't it possible for Gnus to drop the XEmacs 21.4 support?