Re: [RFC] The GNU system's package system

[Richard Stallman]

       Our aim is to avoid these scripts!

    The idea was that these should only be used for non-interactive tasks,
    and not interactive ones, infact, one could probobly remove all of
    them.

It would be much much better not to have them at all.
If we do have these scripts, making or unmaking the symlink
will have to run them.  That would be intolerable if they are
interactive, but even noninteractive scripts make things
harder to maintain and understand.  My goal is that the appearance
and disappearance of the files in the package directly controls
everything necessary to make a package function.  Let's see if
we can get there.

       The Macintosh didn't seem to need them.

    I'm quite unfamiliar with the Macintosh.  This is the only tid-bit I
    found about the package managmanet on Macintosh [1], which seems to
    imply that Macintosh does/did have them:

    ...
    Packages are the solution used by Apple to install Mac OS X and to
    provide System or Applications upgrades via the Software Update
    solution."

Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD.  I think older versions of Mac OS were
simpler in many ways, and that simplicity (if we can achieve it) is
very desirable.