Re: Package format/management ramblingss

[Richard Stallman]

      A good example is
    (/usr/)share/pixmaps in Debian
    (which applies this philosophy extensively), where every program can
    contribute some pixmaps.
    Consider Emacs provides some files for /share/pixmaps (it does not) --
    providing /share/pixmaps-21 would not make sense because one would not
    see the other pixmaps in that directory -- and the name would be
    confusing, of course.

Our preferred way of handling this would be that these don't go in any
shared directory.  Each program would have its own pixmaps and would
find them in its own package directory.  This is the directory that is
linked to from /package.  So emacs would find its pixmaps by looking
in subdir `pixmaps' of the Emacs installation directory, which
might be /packages/emacs-20.  Whatever it is, Emacs would get a pointer
to it on startup. 

Keeping packages independent like this makes installation
and deinstallation simple.