On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 12:40 PM, Dieter Plaetinck <die...@plaetinck.be> wrote: > Sorry that I go slightly off-topic but you mentioned Gnu Stow, I looked it up > and it seems very nice. > i haven't run it yet, but (for those who don't want to read the long > description) from the description it seems like a simple and elegant tool, > which you give a directory ("i want symlinks here") and a bunch of package > directories ("all files in here must be symlinked") > and it will do the right thing on package additions and removals.
Yes, it is pretty nice (although the code base is very old-fashioned). One thing it does which I guess other symlink managers wouldn't, is called "tree folding" - i.e. it makes intelligent decisions about when to symlink to a subdirectory vs. to individual files within that subtree: http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual.html#SEC4 For example, imagine I have a stow package called 'foo' which wants to install a file to ~/local/lib/perl/Acme/Foo.pm (by "install", I mean set up a symlink so that that path points to the Foo.pm inside the stow package). If ~/local doesn't already exist, and 'foo' is the only stow package which installs anywhere under ~/local, then stow's tree folding feature will ensure that ~/local is a symlink back to $STOW_DIR/foo/local/lib/perl/Acme/Foo.pm. However I might very well want to manually place other files inside ~/local which have nothing to do with stow, let alone the 'foo' stow package. It might make sense to have ~/local/lib/perl/Acme/ be a symlink to $STOW_DIR/foo/local/lib/perl/Acme/, but symlinks higher up the tree would be undesirable. This is easily overcome by creating a special stow package (which I call 'ANTIFOLD') which contains (empty) dummy files called .no-stow-folding in those trees. So I run a simple little custom shell script: $ unfold ~/local/lib/perl5 which creates an empty file $STOW_DIR/ANTIFOLD/local/lib/perl5/.no-stow-folding and (re)installs the 'ANTIFOLD' stow package, which causes stow to automatically "split" the ~/local/lib/perl5 tree open so that ~/local/ ~/local/lib/ ~/local/lib/perl5/ are all normal directories, and ~/local/lib/perl5/Acme becomes the symlink. Problem solved! _______________________________________________ vcs-home mailing list vcs-home@lists.madduck.net http://lists.madduck.net/listinfo/vcs-home