GNU stow and friends

I've been using GNU stow, and lately xstow to manage package
installation on my myriad linux systems:

I like the idea of being able to find out what a package a file comes from simply by doing a ls -l on it.
I like only having to look in one place for libraries, and binaries, includes and man pages.
I like having a sane $PATH.
I like a packaging system to use the filesystem to store information about packages.
I like to be able to fix the system with ln when I mangle it.
I also don't have the guts to go to a full on djb style directory layout.

Today I got fed up. GNU stow is nice, but it depends on perl. xstow is nice, because it can be made into a static binary, but it seems a wee bit bloatish. I
can't seem to get either one to support multiple stow directories for a single
target directory, so directory splitting doesn't work properly. So, I'm going
to write my own:

It will be in bash.
It will not be guaranteed to be stow compatible.
It will support n:1 source to target mappings.

jack | posted Thu Aug 17 16:59:56 2006 | updated Thu Aug 17 17:11:16 2006 | #
category: projects/sstow