fedora and emacs (certain functions are not included in emacs)

[joelvsmith at earthlink.net]

i'm using fedora core 4 and my emacs does not contain the function defvaralias.  the basic advice i get from the emacs-wiki newsgroups is that i should scrap my fedora installation of emacs and replace it with a version that contains functions that are left our of fedora's emacs.  defvaralias seems to be an important function for extending the capabilites of emacs, so i'd like to know if my currently installed fedora's version of emacs can be extended to included the c-based emacs function, if fedora plans to include this function and other ones (perhaps translate-region is missing as well), or if these are not possible what's the least painful way for a not so proficient linux user to erase my the emacs install (all packages? emacs, emacs-common, etc.) and what is the easiest rpm package to install that will contain these functions for version 21.4.  any help would be greatly appreciated.