Hello Eric,

For comparison, at the moment, DOG (shell, 1 file per command),
Arachne (browser), Emacs, FreeBASIC, GhostScript, OpenXP, Lynx
browser, Pacific C, Pegasus Mail, SETEDIT and various games are
better off in their own directories, while several 100 single
executable files can nicely stay together in the BIN directory
because you would not want PATH to become too long in DOS.

The (newer) FreeDOS package format already has a links/ mechanism
(http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Package), which allows one to
create executable "shortcuts" in a links/ directory to programs elsewhere.

I am already using this mechanism in my gcc-ia16 packages.  E.g.
i16gcc.zip has a file links/i16gcc.bat, which (newer versions of) the
fdnpkg installer will transform into a small .com file that hands over
to devel/i16gnu/bin/i16gcc.exe.

I think this is a simple and straightforward way to keep %PATH% short,
and still allow each package's files to (largely) go into its own
directory.  Perhaps we just need to get more packages and package
maintainers to use it. :-)

Thank you!

--
https://gitlab.com/tkchia :: https://github.com/tkchia


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