Re: Bootup and package managment (and a small status report)

[Richard M. Stallman]

    I still think that /stow is far clearer than /installed.  Users who
    are already familiar with GNU stow, will understand directly what will
    happen when you put a symbolic link in /stow.

Hardly anyone is familiar with GNU stow.  So we should choose the name
that is clearest to the majority, the people are not familiar with GNU
stow.  That is why I propose /installed.  Can you suggest another name
that is clearer to the typical user?

      /hurd is
    _only_ used for translators (which are also executables), and this has
    always been the case.

I see now--I was confused by some previous messages.
The file that is needed in /hurd is unionfs itself.
Which is a translator, of course.

So this suggestion seems applicable:

      For instance, a program that runs during timesharing could find
    the necessary executable file via unionfs and make a link to it from
    the necessary name so that booting can find it.

This is to say, booting would find unionfs thru a symlink with a standard
name from a dir that is never managed by unionfs, such as /boot/unionfs.
But unionfs, when running, would update that symlink to point to the
version of unionfs that you would find in /hurd/unionfs.

This way, package installation via unionfs would work right for this
file, but booting would not need unionfs to be running.