[gentoo-dev] re: package management using stow

[Gold is Heavy]

> Has someone ever thought about using this?

Heck yea!!  Until you mentioned stow just now, I didn't even know about it.  
I always wanted to do that!  I compile stuff by hand all the time, and the 
best way to maintain things is to make sure that each pacakge sits in its own 
dir, and that everything else is just a symlink.  The worst you can get is a 
few dangling symlinks if you remove the package.  You can a) just carefully 
remove all the appropriate links with the package or b) have a script that 
checks for dangling symlinks and nukes them or c) both.  It's clean, 
efficient, and it makes sense.

Personally I really do NOT like when the packages are spread all over the 
place.  A piece here, a chunk here...it's a big mess.  I never, ever liked 
that.  Another thing I've seen is that not every package has 'make uninstall' 
either.  So, if you do NOT install it in one dir, it's a big mess.  One time 
I did that, and I was kicking myself as I was manually looking through 10 
dirs for what might have or might have not belonged to the package.

If you have solid package management, then the importance of using this kind 
of 'stow' scheme is not as great.  It sure is the only way to go if you 
hand-compile a lot.

Slightly off-topic: If I understand this right, emerge seems to delete the 
sources after it is done with the build.  I think it would be great if it 
could permanently leave the sources installed, as an option, so that you 
could tweak them by hand without tweaking .ebuild files.

--Leo