Michael> We've gone over kpathsea already numerous time for the Michael> job. Michael> For XEmacs, what's needed is something which works at the Michael> package level in a quite different way. Tell me if I'm way off base. I feel like I barely know what I'm talking about. What if the `database.[hc]' got overhauled to support `btree' databases with multiple entries per key? It does that; `global' uses it, and I think the Debian `man-db' does also. I've not had the time to study it in depth, and cannot do the work at this time... but it seems like having that support in the XEmacs database code would be generally useful, for things like `GTAGS', "callers-of", perhaps symbol tables or something (is it fast?), and the package system. It would be good to have `in-memory' btrees and hashes via berkeley db also, maybe... (You tell me and we'll both know.) Record/File locking (in case of multiple processes accessing the .db) ought to go in also. Wouldn't a `tied' hash/btree thing be neat, like "perl" has? (digressing... for that matter, perl regexp's, ala libpcre2, would be really nifty...) You can define a btree database entry with a key and value, then enter another value under the same key. When you do a lookup, you get the first value under that key, then use the `seq' method to grab each of the next values. Utilizing that feature of db, `global' stows a key for a function, then a value for each location it's used. That could work for the package system, with a package name, then a location for each version, I suppose. I think you can use the `btree' to look for values of keys with a certain prefix also, like the `tab' key does in the minibuffer... I think I recall reading something like that in either `global', `man-db', or the `btree' man page. It would have to run an `install-xemacs-package' utility that updated that database. Using a db would avoid the `stat()' calls (possibly slowly occuring accross NFS or SMB connections) at startup. Does the db2 library build on all systems that XEmacs does? I've no clue. I think it builds on Win32; iirc, there are #ifdef's that would indicate that. Shutting up already... Karl.