Re: Package format/management ramblingss

[Richard Stallman]

    My idea was/is that /share/emacs would be /packages/*/share/emacs.
    I.e. more or less what it is now.

Yes, that much I understood.  But I don't understand what
mechanism you are proposing, or what it would do *in general*.
What command would I give that would cause /share/emacs
to be generated virtually in this way?  And why would I want
to do so?

Which other subdirectories of /share would be handled in this way, and
how would we control or specify them?

       The images in Emacs are for Emacs alone to use, they are internal
       files.  Right now Emacs puts them into a shared directory because
       that's the only way for an installed Emacs to get at them, but that
       isn't very clean.

    So you want to introduce a shared-internal-data directory?

Sorry, I do not follow.  I am not sure what a "shared-internal-data
directory" would mean.  I do not know whether that term fits
my proposal.

What I have proposed for these files is the following:

* They are included in the Emacs tarball in the subdirectories etc
and lisp.

* When the tarball is unpacked, they are in WHEREVER/emacs-21.3/etc
and WHEREVER/emacs-21.3/lisp.

* When the symlink /package/SOMENAME -> WHEREVER/emacs-21.3 is made to
install this package, they are also in /package/SOMENAME/etc and
/package/SOMENAME/lisp.

(By convention, SOMENAME would usually be `emacs' but it could be
anything.  Unless SOMENAME contains suffixes that specify renaming
of executables, substitution, etc, it is irrelevant.)

* When Emacs starts up, it gets a pointer to WHEREVER/emacs-21.3.

* When Emacs wants these files, it uses that pointer to find them.

In my proposal we do NOT put these files into /share.

The reason Emacs on GNU/Linux and Unix puts these files into share is
so that the installed Emacs can find them and use them.  My proposal
above is a better, cleaner solution to that problem.  There is no need
to put these files into /share, and I see no reason to do so.

If you think there is a reason to put these files into /share,
could you tell me what it is?