Re: Package format/management ramblingss

[Richard Stallman]

    I was unclear.  What I meant was that a package is only allowed to put
    files inside of the directory /packages/PACKAGE; where /packages can
    be anything.  I.e. if you extract a package you will end up with one
    directory, that will contain _all_ files that belong to the package.

Yes.  That is the unpacked package directory.

       I don't think this makes sense.  We don't want to produce
       /share/emacs in this way.

    Agreed, but for the user the directory /share/emacs would contain what
    is in /package/*/emacs.  So infact, /share is a union of
    /package/*/share/emacs.

Do we really need to have any such thing as /share/emacs?  Emacs can
get all of its files directly out of its unpacked package directory.

       But I think the right solution is not to use /share/emacs at all.
       All the files that might have gone in /share/emacs should be in
       /packages/emacs-20/etc, /packages/emacs-20/lisp, and so on.

    I don't know if this is a typo, sure looks like it...

There is no typo.  I meant that completely literally.  Emacs can get
all of its data files directly out of its unpacked package directory.
It has no need to "install" them somewhere else.


Are you thinking that /share/e,acs would be so other packages can
install Emacs Lisp files?

We could enable programs to create directories under /share
as follows:  /whatever/emacs-20/ would contain a subdirectory
share/emacs, with a file share/emacs/CREATE-ME.

The translator for /share would notice the file 
share/emacs/CREATE-ME inside the Emacs 20 package, and it
would therefore present a subdirectory emacs, and it would
merge in the subdirectories share/emacs of whatever other
packages are present.