Re: [Bug-stow] Fwd: info dir conflict installing emacs from source

[Adam Spiers]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the mails.  Yes, your suggestions about rewording the error
message sound good to me.  Unfortunately I'm extremely busy at the
moment but I'd gladly review and merge pull requests to
https://github.com/aspiers/stow/ which improve them.

The info dir clash is a known issue, and again you are thinking along
the right lines regarding install-info.  In this case Stow needs to
handle the conflict in the same way that rpm .spec files do it:
exclude the info dir file from the package's manifest, and instead
call install-info via a post-installation hook script.  Stow currently
lacks support for pre/post-installation (and -uninstallation) hooks,
but I doubt it would be hard to add them.  It's been on my TODO list
for literally years :-/

Regards,
Adam

On 27 September 2015 at 03:11, jeff stern <address@hidden> wrote:
> Sorry, there were several crucial pathname errors in last email message. I
> have corrected them. Please delete previous message. Here is the corrected
> message:
>
> Hello,
>
> Using stow when compiling and installing emacs from source today, following
> the instructions at (*) and (+) was almost a no-brainer for me, except for
> one thing: a conflict when trying to run stow.  It turns out stow had a
> conflict with dir files (you probably know about this already..?)
>
>    /usr/local/stow/emacs-24.5/share/info/dir  <--- /usr/local/share/info/dir
>
> But stow could not make the above symlink from /usr/local/share/info/dir
> because /usr/local/share/info/dir already existed (and I already had info
> files in that dir).
>
> Therefore, when I finished compiling emacs successfully and installing under
> /usr/local/stow/emacs-24.5, and then ran stow, I got an error:
>
> =========================================================
> $ ./configure --with-xft --with-x-toolkit=lucid
> $ make
> $ sudo make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/emacs-24.5
> $ cd /usr/local/stow
> $ sudo stow --verbose=3 emacs-24.5
> WARNING! stowing emacs-24.5 would cause conflicts:
>   * existing target is neither a link nor a directory: share/info/dir
> All operations aborted.
> $ _
> =========================================================
>
> ..and it took me most of the afternoon to figure out what it was (being a
> first-time user of stow).
>
> The conflict was not with "share/info/dir" nor with
> "/usr/local/stow/emacs-24.5/share/info/dir". It was with a previously
> existing file, "/usr/local/share/info/dir".  Again, as a first time user of
> stow, I did not know this and could not tell easily from the error message
> because of the incomplete path listed.
>
> Suggestion #1: It would save me time if in future versions of stow, the
> error message were more explicit in 4 ways:
>
> use full pathnames,
> say what action exactly stow was trying to take
> mention BOTH the source and the target files involved, and
> tell the user what action they can now take.
>
>
> For instance, ideally I would have seen an error message like the following:
>
> Conflict: I cannot create a symlink from /usr/local/share/info/dir to
> /usr/local/stow/emacs-24.5/share/info/dir because there is a file already
> existing at /usr/local/share/info/dir. Please rectify this conflict by hand
> (perhaps merging the two files into
> /usr/local/stow/emacs-24.5/share/info/dir , then removing or moving
> /usr/local/share/info/dir out of the way), and run stow again.
>
>
> Suggestion #2: Is it possible to merge 2 dir files into 1?
>
> It seems to me that my previously-existing dir file
> (/usr/local/share/info/dir) and the new one coming in from the emacs
> compilation (/usr/local/stow/emacs-24.5/share/info/dir) really needed to be
> merged into a single file. So..
>
> 2a) Can install-info merge two "dir" files? (I don't know enough about
> install-info).
>
> 2b) If so, would it be possible to enhance stow so that if it sees a dir
> file conflict it calls install-info intelligently the background to merge
> them?
>
> Thanks,
> Let me know if there is any additional information I can provide.
>
> Jeff Stern address@hidden
>
> (*) http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BuildingEmacs#toc2
> (+) https://gist.github.com/favadi/18438172892bc4178b27
>
> additional system info, per instructions ..
>
> stow (GNU Stow) version 2.2.0
> perl v5.18.2) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi
> Linux tonka 3.13.0-63-lowlatency #103-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Fri Aug 14 22:23:32
> UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
> Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (distro: "KXStudio")
>
>