Re: Package format/management ramblingss

[Richard Stallman]

    >That is pretty close to the way Hurd-based package management will
    >work, so I think we should use Stow for the actual installation part
    >of the job.  That way, when we do theHurd-based package management,
    >it won't be too big a change.
    >  
    >

    Stow is small and reliant on Perl.  If the goal is to write our own, why 
    not do it now?

If someone wants to do that, it would be great.
It is not a small job, though.

    So the the tarballs now contain the binary "application" and the 
    metadata?  So we must re-create every tarball?

I don't quite understand that statement.  When you say "re-create
every tarball", who are you referring to, and for what job?
Who would have to recreate them, and in what situations?

    * pull the pax file which contains the package and the metadata 
    (relationships, install paths for stow, pre/post scripts??)
    * the package gets dumped to packagefs which automagically creates the 
    appropriate symlinks

That might be more or less what I was suggesting.