OTOH, the path is always the global path, not the one belonging to any specific patch - so it's probably useless to the gui anyway, hmm.
Things like [declare] can set the global path, IIRC. ::pd_path and ::pd_startup are not useless in pd-gui, they are used for loading GUI plugins and building the Help Browser based on installed libraries, and could be used in a lot of other things.
.hc
[declare] sets a path local to the patch it's in. There might have to be changes in declare allowing abstractions to change the path even without having the owning patch change (this is the subject of much comfusion and worry :)
[declare] also loads 'libraries', which are then global. Probably when that happens it would be apropriate for pd to throw the info up to the gui (but not via the startup variable -- that would need to reflect only what's there by default when starting Pd afresh).
Oh yes, and -lib itself needs somehow to be made to work locally to the patch, but this is a huge issue I don't know how to deal with.
cheers M