Re: Package format/management ramblingss

[Richard Stallman]

    But there is another problem: A *very* few programs consist of a single
    file, so this file could not be just the file which would appear in
    /bin.  Instead, it could be a directory which contains all the files
    it ``exports'':  bin/emacs, (share/)doc/emacs, ...
    When you request /bin/emacs, it therefore has to search
    /packages/*/bin and /home/<me>/packages/*/bin -- excluding the
    directories it does not prefer -- for the file `emacs', which is very
    inefficient.

The idea is to compute this in advance, and keep a table prepared.

    Yet another aspect is the handling of dependencies.  Therefore, every
    package could have its own dependency file, which is syntactically
    similar to the preferences file:

This would all be processed in advance.  Recalculation would be needed
only when the set of installed packages changes.

The Hurd lets a program ask to be notified whenever a certain file or
dir gets changed.  Using this feature the translator for /bin would
always know when to recalculate something.