This is disabled, perhaps because in earlier versions a trivial patch would be needed to make it work.

I am running self-built packages with XFT rendering since 15 months without a single problem on Fedora 10 & 12.

If you enable it *nothing* will change for users who do not take special steps to use XFT fonts.

Relying on bitmapped fonts is an evergrowing pain as it is extremely difficult to find any that covers all my character sets, not to mention they look horribly.

If you enable it and want to see a difference you need to put something like this into .Xdefaults:
   XEmacs.default.attributeFont: Mono:size=11.5
   XEmacs.bold.attributeFont: Mono:size=11.5:style=Bold
   XEmacs.italic.attributeFont: Mono:size=11.5:style=Oblique
   XEmacs.bold-italic.attributeFont: Mono:size=11.5:style=Bold Oblique
   XEmacs.modeline.attributeFont: Sans:size=10
   XEmacs.menubar.font: Sans:size=10
   XEmacs*xftFont: Sans:size=10


Thanks
Richard