[Help-stow] very slow unstow

[Harald Kirsch]

Unstowing in a large directory hierarchy is painfully slow. Two ideas
to circumvent this come to mind:

1) It seems like stow searches the whole "target directory" structure
to find things to unstow. A quick-mode could instead use the stowed
version for hints on what to delete.

2) For installation of new versions of a software-package a force-mode
would always overwrite links in the target-directory which point into
the stow directory. Even saver would be a replace-mode, where you give
an old and a new software package and allow to overwrite links to the
old package only.

Both methods might, under rare circumstances, leave dangling links in
the target directory. But this is easy to clean. Again two modes are
possible: delete all dangling links or delete only those pointing
somewhere into the stow directory.

Finally: really cool would be an option to upgrade a package by just
giving the basename, e.g.

   stow --upgrade thing

would glob for thing*, which normally should yield a list like

  thing-2.1 thing-2.2 thing-2.2a

Then, the currently installed version is guessed, the most recent
version is guessed and a replace is performed as described in (2)
above.

Ok, this is really for only for lusers -:)

Anyway, I like stow already very much.

  Harald Kirsch

-- 
----------------+----------------------------------------------------
Harald Kirsch   | address@hidden
LION bioscience | +49 6221 4038 172