Re: [Help-stow] Stow directory and subdirectory

[Junchen Gu]

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 12:51 PM, Adam Spiers <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 11:04:05AM -0600, Junchen Gu wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I just started to use stow today and thanks for making this awesome tool!
>
> :-)
>
>> After playing around with it, I got it to work but I have two questions:
>>
>> 1. It seems that stow only applies to package directory, not
>> individual executable.
>
> Correct.
>
>> I have installed several tools where there is
>> only one executable I want to stow in the package directory among many
>> other files. If I stow the package directory, everything will be
>> stowed, which is not what I want. Is there or will there be a function
>> to only select executables based on their names? I know the ignore
>> list function but when there is only one or two executables I want,
>> it's much harder to ignore many things than picking up a few.
>
> Well, stow was born as a sort of package manager, so this usage
> pattern was never really the intent.  If you only have one or two
> executables to stow, why not just run "ln -s" manually?  The point of
> stow is to manage whole farms of symlinks, where running "ln -s"
> manually would be too cumbersome.  Having said that, I'd happily
> *consider* pull requests adding support for this, but first I'd still
> need a bit of convincing that it's worthwhile.
>

OK. I've came up with my own alternative for this. I just created a
new directory inside the program's directory and stow that one.

>> 2. In the GNU manual page
>> (http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/stow.html), it says " If a
>> new subdirectory is encountered whilst stowing a new package, the
>> subdirectory is created within the target, and its contents are
>> symlinked, rather than just creating a symlink for the directory" I
>> can see this happen where the executables in the subdirectory (/bin)
>> can be invoked when I only have the target directory in the $PATH.
>> However, I don't understand why in the terminal, I can only see
>> subdirectory symlinks but not actual executable symlinks?
>
> I'm not sure I follow.  Please could you paste the exact stow commands
> you used, together with their output, and also the same for running
> "ls -l" on the directories in question?
>

I don't remember the command.. it's just a regular "stow -S". I also
used the above mentioned tricks to get around it. It's not an issue,
just that i don't understand how it worked..


-- 
Best,
Junchen