(28-05-2020, 06:05 PM)sth Wrote: i've considered changing it so that all files installed go into a specific directory (like /usr/local/s3pkg/<packagename>/) and then just creating symlinks to the binaries in /usr/local/bin or something.

An even cooler idea would be to use an union FS mount point. Some internet friends made a distro a while back, and they had this idea (certainly ripped off plan9), to install every package in a particular place, say /packages/NAME/{bin,man,lib}, and then union mount it directly on /.

The cool stuff about union mount is that it merge all the mount points together, and you can even specify which one will be written to in can someone writes to /bin. For example in /opt/custom/bin …

It require a lot more logic in the package manager though, as it would then need to handle mountpoints, version and so on.

I could be wrong, but I think the Nix package manager does something similar.