Re: Status

[Richard Stallman]

    | With the increased flexibility in implementing filesystems as per
    | the requirements, we can implement the functionality similar to
    | apt-get, emerge or yum... (dependency tracking, versions
    | tracking...) in the filesystem itself.

    We can't.  apt-get, emerge, and yum are interactive processes, a
    file-system requires a non-interactive processes since it doesn't have
    any communication with the terminal and keyboard.  If something goes
    wrong, you want it to fail as cleanly as possible, the more `magic'
    you add, the worse things can fail.

Yes we can.  If package A says it depends on having B provided,
anbd B is not provided, then treat A as not really installed,
and display a notice about this in a suitable place.

If packages C and D say they are exclusive, and both are "installed",
and the user has not indicated a preference between them, then
arbitrarily choose one of them, and display a notice about this in a
suitable place telling the user to please choose.

It is true that this does do the whole job.  It does the bottom half.
We will want a program that the user can use to browse the available
packages and select them.  We want it to know, when the user asks to
install package A, to ask the user "Do you want B as well?"

With luck, we can use something like dselect which already does this
job.