package system: questions, suggestions, alien

Hi I admit I rarely have used the package system other than from time to time download a new Sumo tarball. Private packages I maintain in the old way, ie downloading in a private dir, compiling, and then setting the path appropriately. It leads to huge home directory and I would like to change. Now I tried to use the package-tools to maintain 3d party products. X-symbol for example already can be downloaded in package form. After reading the FAQS the README.packages and http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/beta/html/xemacs_25.html#SEC261 The following questions remain. 1. I want to download a new (let's say even a official) package to a temporary directory and install/update it from there. So I thought (pui-add-install-directory "~/tmp") would do the job, in the sense that pui-list-package would list my all the package contained in this directory and flag them as uninstall. This was not the case. 2. I want to list 3 party packages via pui-list-packages, which can be in prefix/xemacs/site-packages or in ~/.xemacs/xemacs-packages so I was looking for a variable, like pui-3-party-global-dir pui-3-party-local-dir did not find any, so I played with pui-add-install-directory but as I understand this is for setting an additional directory for Installation. I presume I miss something fundamental. Maybe 3d party package are not meant to be controlled by pui? If so I consider this as a severe disadvantage! 3. Version numbers: couldn't the package numbers coincide with the version numbers of the maintainer? vm now does :), but auctex and others do not. Yes pressing I will give this information, but anyhow the convenience would be greater if the numbers coincided. 4. May be that has been asked already, but are there plans to write a tool, which allows to convert an already compiled package to to the xemacs package standard?. I am thinking of something equivalent to ALIEN for tgz2rpm. Uwe Brauer