> It's possible I'm misunderstanding here, but aren't hpkgs mounted in an overlay fashion? That's not how AppImages work.

They can be mounted either way. The /system/ packagefs mountpoint is a kind of "overlay" in the loose sense, but it does not use the standard "overlayfs" but rather packagefs manages the "overlay" itself for a variety of reasons (both technical and practical.)

But I don't know what difference that really makes vs. AppImages.

> If the functionality isn't exposed to the user it may as well not exist.

Okay, so it "doesn't exist," but it still could be implemented without too much effort.

> And if it is as straight forward as you claim (which I doubt), why hasn't it been done?

Because, like I already said, we have precious little time and far more important things to work on, and very few people seem to have wanted this. And some of the ones that (at one point) did were third-party application developers who could have written a tool to do it, but they didn't either, so it seems in the end they also found it unnecessary.

> You seem to be motivated to shut me the hell up enough that you've probably spent the requisite amount time arguing on the internet about it already.

If all you were saying was "I want X feature but you are never going to do that / it is impossible", I am going to spend my time arguing against the "but". Then once it gets down to "I want X feature", I would to convince you to file a ticket or ask about it on the forums to collect feedback so we could actually consider it and prototype something, and eventually implement it if there is enough demand and we have the time.

But you seem to have no interest in actually using Haiku probably ever, so spending time implementing a feature that one person currently wanting it may never use does not sound like a good investment to me.

> but you can't even determine the order of magnitude of your current user base (is it hundreds or thousands?),

We (intentionally) don't collect metrics of how many actually running systems there are; we can only estimate from the number of downloads of the nightly images and package updates. Which are consistent with "hundreds to low thousands." Hopefully our disdain for pervasive user tracking will not incur a demerit in that we do not know certain things trackers would tell us...

> I'm saying I don't like the way it is done. That's all. Appealing to your rationale for why you don't do it my way isn't going to convince me otherwise.

Again, your disputes are "I don't like the way it is done because X", when in fact X is not true, and that is my dispute.

> Holy shit. I have to actually recompile? That's some Linux-grade badness there.

Uh. You have to recompile code in order to add features. If someone added support to get this from a configuration file, then you wouldn't. Not sure why you are so surprised.

> I don't think blessed paths are a good solution in the first place (see: magic).

Next you are going to tell me that /dev and /proc, being "blessed paths" are "magic". If you are not going to say that, what is the actual difference between that and this, that makes these paths "not magic"?

> and structure should be entirely up to the user.

If you are really saying entirely, without any limits, then you are right, we are going to hit some disagreements. If you do admit some limits (really, any at all), then we may still agree. macOS is an "opinionated" system, and Haiku is too; not nearly as much, that's for sure, but we are not the "wide open west" of Linux.