> > Well, maybe the list can be constructed automatically
> > just once when Maxima is built.
> > Did we consider that before? I don't remember.
> >
> This is how maxima worked before, but we sometimes forgot to add share
> directories to the list. Doing it automatically relieves us of this
> manual task.
>
> I suppose we could have configure build the list for us so we don't
> have to. But then we can't later install a new share package (after
> installation) and have maxima automatically pick that up. This doesn't
> happen very often, I suppose, so the advantage of automatically adding
> paths is not so much.
>
> But I think xemacs automatically scans directories to look for its
> packages. XEmacs should have a problem too on this system.
Well the problem is not scanning directories per se but doing so
recursively: We have to stat every file to see if it is a directory
or not. We could avoid this if we agreed on some common directory
structure. It would still be possible to use nested directories, but
users would have to load a package like load("foo/package") ...
It think that might be reasonable for future packages, but on the
downside we would have to relocate lots of files to avoid user
visible effects on existing packages.
Currently the share directory is nested 4 levels deep, though the
last level mostly consists of directories with test-scripts. I don't
know how these things work in detail, but perhaps some compromise can
be found ...
HTH,
Harald