Re: feature/integrated-elpa 4f6df43 15/23: README added

[Stefan Monnier]

> I'd rather have the "lots of directories" setup, if I had to choose.
> It's significantly better in the long term IMHO, so it's worth
> short-term inconvenience and acclimation.

If we take the files bundled with Emacs and look at how many ELPA
packages they would turn into, we'd end up with a load path that has
more than 200 elements.

FWIW, I've always been wary of having "one dir per package" because of
the performance impact of having a thousand directories in load-path.
Lookup in a large directory is easily optimized to O(log N) or something
like that, but a search along load-path won't be similarly optimized by
the kernel.

[ In `install.el` (an old package that predates package.el), I installed
  all single-file packages into a shared directory specifically for
  that reason.  ]

This is not based on actual experience, tho, so maybe I'm worrying about
nothing.


        Stefan