Re: Package format/management ramblingss

[Richard Stallman]

    By the way:  I wonder if and how we should provide other versions of
    packages separately as described in my initial posting, such as:

    /bin/emacs-20 -> /packages/emacs-20/bin/emacs

    and on the other hand

    /bin/emacs-21 -> /packages/emacs-21/bin/emacs

I described a proposal for how to do this.
The idea is to use special codes in symlink names--something like this:

 Symlink /package/emacs:-20 -> /packages/emacs-20
 means append -20 to the name of every executable
 that comes from /packages/emacs-20/bin.

So you could have these three symlinks:

 /package/emacs-20 -> /packages/emacs-20
 /package/emacs-20:-20 -> /packages/emacs-20
 /package/emacs-21:-21 -> /packages/emacs-21

The executable /packages/emacs-20/bin/emacs
would then appear in /bin as `emacs' and as `emacs-20'.
The executable /packages/emacs-21/bin/emacs
would appear in /bin only as `emacs-21'.