The attached patch series is mostly aimed at removing XEmacs-specific code, which is not needed, since our version of ispell.el has been part of GNU Emacs for some time, and is not imported from upstream (the most recent upstream release was over 20 years ago). Similarly, some workarounds for older versions of GNU Emacs are removed (since ispell.el is not distributed separately); in any case, most of the workarounds seem to pertain to GNU Emacs pre-version 21.

The pre-VCS change history is also removed by the patch.

This clean-up series is aimed at making things neat before I add enchant support (bug #17742), which will be a very simple change.

One patch also removes the pre-GNU Emacs maintainer information, so that attentive users (who read the source!) do not mistakenly try to file bug reports &c. with the original upstream.

I have supplied the patches as a series for ease of reading, but could compress them if desired for installation in Emacs git.