Re: Package format/management ramblingss

[Richard Stallman]

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

    This would be the /dev/mydata directory that you described.

The idea of /dev/mydata, which I did not explain very clearly, is that
for each package it refers to that package's directory.  When Emacs
tries to read /dev/mydata, it would get WHEREVER/emacs-20.0/, but when
Mozilla tries to read /dev/mydata, it would get
SOMEWHERE-ELSE/mozilla-6.2/, and so on.

    It would be even cleaner if one just introduced a "data" directory in
    the actual package structure, and use that directly instead of
    /dev/mydata.

I can't understand how one could do the same job as the other.

      Say that it has its data in
    alle eg. ~/emacs-21.3 then emacs would just use ~/emacs-21.3/data/etc
    to access any files/directoris it needs directly,

That won't work easily because Emacs doesn't know what file name to
use.  That is the problem to which /dev/mydata is the solution.
/dev/mydata gives Emacs (or any program) a way to get at the right
directory automatically, without having to know its name.

    Okie, now I know where our trouble lies, you have been talking about
    the specific case of the etc and lisp directories in Emacs.  And that
    the directories that contain the info pages
    (/packages/emacs/share/info), would still be avaiable in /share/info.

Yes, we would probably want to handled /share/info just like
/etc and /bin, and so on.


                                                      instead of going
    through /dev/mydata.