You mean software that expects to run from /boot/beos? Because we stopped using that path YEARS before we did any package management work. I think you are blaming problems on package management that it, in fact, didn’t create.
So, you can try this:
ln -s /boot/system/non-packaged /boot/beos
and happily move on with your BeOS apps. If they are not broken by other problems, that is…
In any case, I will once again renew my offer to personally investigate problems in BeOS apps that have stopped working because of PackageFS. I think I got exactly 0 reports so far where the problem was actually packagefs. You may instead find one of these:
- The way keyboard events are handled has changed, meaning some apps will lose keystrokes because they did not forward BMessage to the BWindow default handling code
- BBitmap::ImportBits was changed, to fix the BeOS app spirograph, but in doing so it broke several other apps
- We don’t implement BeOS R5 style net_server, so you have to find apps built for Bone instead if there is any network involved (not so moch of a problem, pretty much everyone had migrated to Bone when it became available)
- Apps hardcoding paths to /boot/beos (NOT /boot/system, which didn’t exist on BeOS)
- Your app is actually not working on BeOS either, it is built for an older version of Haiku or for Zeta
- The app is just broken and the bug also existed on BeOS or it worked there by accident (for example, use after free or buffer overflow, that on BeOS happens to not overwrite anything important but on Haiku it crashes)
Anyway, I don’t think we should re-have the debate about the package manager AGAIN. We did that a thousand times already. We know no one will change their mind. We know you say “users vs developers” but in reality it is “a small number of users vs everyone else who is very happy with the current situation”. We also know that despite threats and heated debates and so on, no one actually ever started an Haiku fork removing the package manager, or the people who did did not actually maintain it for very long, showing, I think, that there isn’t that much demand for it.