XStow

News

2005-03-06

During the last 2 years I made some small bugfixes, added small features and always thought that the changes are too small for publishing a new release. But all together these changes are to heavy for simple publishing it as a stable release.
So here it is: a preview unstable release of something that may will become version 1.0.0.
From now on all unstable releases are marked explicit as unstable!
Sources are available on Sourceforge Download Page

2003-03-02

XStow is now integrated in the ports system of Free BSD.

2002-12-31

XStow is now available on debian/unstable.
Thanks to Mats Rynge for uploading the package.

About

XStow is a replacement of GNU Stow written in C++. It supports all features of Stow with some extensions.

XStow as GNU Stow, are programs for managing the installation of software packages, keeping them separate (/usr/local/stow/emacs vs. /usr/local/stow/perl, for example) while making them appear to be installed in the same place (/usr/local).

Stow requires Perl. But what's on systems where no Perl is available, or not yet installed? I tried compiling Stow with perlcc, but it failed.

For compiling XStow a C++ compiler and a system with a couple of POSIX functions is required. It does not depend on an interpreter. Static compilation eg.: for resque disks is possible.

XStow installs packages in exact the same way like stow, so you even can start a Linux From Scratch installation with XStow and when Perl is running, you can continue installation by using GNU Stow.

Even the command line options are compatible.

But there are:

Special Features

All of them breaking compatibility with Stow!
But who cares... :)

• Creation of symlinks with absolute path names.
• Traversal link support. (create a link from /usr/share/man to /usr/man)
• Multiple stow directories support.
• Shell pattern matching.
• Regular Expressions Support.
• Global settings via configuration files.
• Automatically merging GNU-Info's 'dir' files.
• ...

Note

Even if there is the 'X' in XStow's name, it is a complete command line based application. There is no X11 support in any way.

Martin Oberzalek <kingleo@gmx.at> Sun Mar 6 19:35:22 CET 2005