Re: [Help-stow] Stow conflict help

[Adam Spiers]

Hi Dominic,

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 9:38 AM, Dominic Steinitz <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am getting the following warnings / errors. It seems to suggest I need a 
> user called stow and then giving this user ownership of e.g. 
> /usr/local/bin/freetype-config. I couldn't find any mention of having to 
> create a user called stow in the docs or when I searched the Internet. Any 
> help would be much appreciated.

No, you are misreading the errors.  It's nothing to do with ownership
in the UNIX file permissions sense.  Read the "Ownership" section of
the manual:

http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/html_node/Installing-Packages.html#Ownership

> CONFLICT when stowing freetype-2.4.8: existing target is not owned by stow: 
> bin/freetype-config

This means that there is already a file freetype-config in the bin/
subdirectory of your target directory, but it is not a symlink to
within a stow package directory - in other words it was put there by
something other than the Stow program. In this sense, it is not owned
by the Stow *program*, therefore Stow cannot safely remove it and stow
the new version in its place.  So you should figure out why these
files already exist in the target directory, and if appropriate,
remove them before executing the stow command.

You should also read the docs for the --adopt option in case that is of use.

Cheers,
Adam